6 ms·
MIT AI Lab back in the 1960s published technical reports containing program code. The military slang 'FUBAR' f'ed up beyond all recognition, was in the student
by symbolicAGI 2y ago
MIT AI Lab back in the 1960s published technical reports containing program code.
The military slang 'FUBAR' f'ed up beyond all recognition, was in the student and professor engineering vocabulary. The tradition became to use 'fu' and 'bar' as nominal function names, in same manner as X and Y were nominal variables.
Often in the MIT technical reports, one would see 'x = fu(y)' or 'y > bar(z)' and so forth. If you knew, you knew.
A few years later, perhaps with the welcome progress of more female faculty and students, textbooks changed the spelling, but not the pronunciation of the vulgar acronym 'fu' to 'foo'. Again, if you knew, you knew.
And now you all know.
- stackghost 2y agoWhy would women in particular object to "fu" and not "foo"?
- the_gipsy 2y agoBecause they are subject both to sexual harassment and to higher expectations, including "professionalism" (not using profanity at the workplace in this specific case).
- b59831 2y agoThis isn't an answer to the question. Smug responses like this just means you don't actually have a point.
- the_gipsy 2y agoHow does it not answer the question "why would women avoid fu over foo"? I thought it was clear that "fu" means "fuck up" or even "fuck you", a sexual swear word, while "foo" means nothing at all.
- jckahn 2y agoIs it not clear what “f” and “u” is short for?
- stackghost 2y agoOf course it is. What's not clear is what that has to do with women.
- jckahn 2y agoI imagine that, due to the societal expectations historically placed on women, they’ve typically had to be “the adult in the room.” Contrast this with men historically being able to get away with acting childishly (or worse). So when terminology used in the workplace is particularly vulgar, it would follow that women would take more issue with it than men.
- the_gorilla 2y ago> due to the societal expectations historically placed on women This reads like aliens trying (and failing) to figure out why women act more like women than men do.
- jckahn 2y agoCan you elaborate on that? My goal was to be as clear as possible and leave minimal room for misinterpretation.
- b59831 2y agoThis is a sexist statement
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoIn the 60's the belief was that they could not tolerate profanity. Or maybe it was that they'd tattle on the rest of us.
- johnyzee 2y agoThere was a concept of treating women with respect.
- smcin 2y agoThat's a non-sequitur. There are plenty of other words that start with 'fu-'. It's also a loanword from Chinese. And even if not, I haven't heard anyone describe the coinage 'fupa' as offensive.
- smcin 2y agoTo the downvoters: I said I don't find merit in the suggestion that using 'fu' (or 'foo' as a function name) would be considered to constitute profanity. When learning programming, I simply learned 'foo, 'bar' and 'baz' as silly-sounding example function names. I didn't make any connection from 'foo' in the CS context to 'fubar' in US military slang till over a decade later. (Neglecting that there weren't many women in CS in the 1960s. I don't even see that the word-fragment would have been considered offensive in civilian context, esp. to non-US speakers of English)
- dragonwriter 2y agoIn the 60s, women were generally infantilized, but I suspect the “it was done for the women” explanation for the drift of “fu” to the already-existing term “foo” once separate from the other part of “fubar” is a just-so story, rather than a historical fact.
- symbolicAGI 2y agoBack in the 1960s United States, women were often perceived as more sensitive to public profanity, compared to men of the same age.
- bee_rider 2y agoI think it is actually a little funny, nowadays of course the assumption that we particularly should be less profane around women would be seen as old fashioned and kind of a bit sexist. But I guess at the time swearing less was probably seen as a way to make women less uncomfortable. And I’m sure in some cases it did help. An interesting example of the quirks we carry along with us, and the fact that the combination of behavior, intention, and interpretation can mix oddly.
- patrick451 2y agoI limit swearing in mixed company and I'm not even that old.
- bee_rider 2y agoI limit swearing among people I don’t know very well of either gender. Among my friends, I haven’t noticed any difference in who is bothered by it.
- Loughla 2y agoI only limit swearing in professional environments; meetings to be honest. Everywhere else gets the shit and hell and damn that I use in regular language. No slurs and no sexual words like Fuck. But that's just good manners. Curse words are like salt and pepper for the language. They're not necessary, but often add just the right amount of extra spice.
- bee_rider 2y agoOh, that’s an interesting thought, good point. I agree on the idea that slurs and sex-based stuff should be avoided (crassness should be fun for everyone, not exclusionary). I hadn’t put fuck in that bucket really, but of course it does have some sexual definitions.
- Spivak 2y agoAnd it's not that hard to understand, it wasn't as if women would faint at hearing the word fuck, but that casual swearing made an environment feel like a boys club which used to be strongly exclusionary. Go talk to your grandmothers about it, the 60s was the start of second wave feminism— we're not talking about "they said guys to refer to a mixed group" but "how dare a skirt talk back to a man" level sexism.
- greenthrow 2y agoThat part of the comment is not true.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago> Why would women in particular object to "fu" and not "foo"? Honestly I don't know pussy.
- riiii 2y agoBecause fu.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- reaperducer 2y agoA few years later, perhaps with the welcome progress of more female faculty and students, textbooks changed the spelling, but not the pronunciation of the vulgar acronym 'fu' to 'foo'. I was always told that fu became foo because it lined up nicely on screens and on paper, making the code easier to scan. foo = 1 bar = 2 looks better than fu = 1 bar = 2
- WalterBright 2y agoOn a related note, we all know the story from WW2 where Bastogne was surrounded by the Wehrmacht, and the Wehrmacht sent a note to General McAuliffe suggesting he surrender. He returned with a note that simply said "nuts". I simply did not believe than an American GI ever said "nuts". So, I asked my dad (WW2 veteran). He said he briefly worked for the General, and asked him what he actually wrote. The General laughed, and replied "what do you think I wrote?" F-U The Stars&Stripes journalists changed it to "nuts" thinking the Americans couldn't handle the profanity.
- stackghost 2y agoI doubt this story very much. It's well documented that McAuliffe rarely used profanity, and it's similarly well documented, including by the US Army official historian, that the official reply was indeed "nuts". https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/40063/what-did-general-mcauliffe-actually-say-at-bastogne https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/40063/what-did-g...
- WalterBright 2y agoPeople who rarely use profanity means they do use it, and when they do, they do it for effect. Certainly, a demand that he surrender Bastogne would justify profanity in a forceful response. > including by the US Army official historian An official US Army historian's job is to make the US Army look good. As we are all painfully aware these days, the accounts of newspapers are rarely accurate, and often outright fabrications. Why would WW2 accounts be any different? I doubt McAuliffe would want to besmirch his record after the war, had nothing to gain by contraindicating it, and would be content to let it stand. My father was a carefully honest man, and was never known by me to lie. He held his tongue until after McAuliffe passed away. He also told me some family secrets after all involved had passed, and asked me to keep them to myself until after he died, which I did. It never occurred to me to ask him to write down that story, and now it's too late. I know my evidence is hearsay and inadmissible in court. You're free to draw your own conclusions. P.S. I was once personally involved in an incident that made the local TV news. There was nothing political about it, but each of the three local news channels got essentially all the basic facts about it wrong. But that is the "record" of the event. It pretty much soured me on the veracity of news reports.
- mncharity 2y ago> Often in the MIT technical reports, one would see 'x = fu(y)' or 'y > bar(z)' Hmm, "fu"? The decades confound my memory, but I don't immediately recall seeing a "fu" there? Before the "foo" of AIM-127a[1] in 1967 and MIT-LCS-TR-032[2] in 1966, there's still a decade of AI Memos, and couple of years of TRs. DSpace finds at least some "fu"s... lots of ocr fragments. The AITR-220 '64 hit is ocr fragment. My search-fu tonight wasn't up to being exhaustive (spot checks were all fragments). And also, OCR could be missing older "fu"s. But I didn't quickly find a real "fu". A foo-bar-baz-quux in MIT-LCS-TR-365[3] in 1986. One can start on the CSAIL collections page[4] and explore. [1] "FOO" in abstract of AIM-127a LISP Linkage Feature: Incorporating MIDAS into PDP-6 LISP https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6136 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6136 [2] "Thus if FOO has the definition (LAMBDA (X Y) [alpha]), and the user calls SYSTEM1 with NAME= FOO, ADVICE= [beta], WHERE= BEFORE" on page 43 of MIT-LCS-TR-032 Pilot: A Step Towards Man-Computer Symbiosis https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/149354 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/149354 [3] "if the back trace is: FOO [1] <- BAR (2] <- BAZ [3] <- QUUX [4]" on page 20 of ID World: An Environment for the Development of a Dataflow Programs Written in ID MIT-LCS-TR-365 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/149633 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/149633 [4] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5458 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5458
- yreg 2y agoFor people, who (like me) don't know US military slang, FUBAR apparently means 'Fucked/Fouled Up Beyond All/Any Repair/Recognition/Reason' according to Wikipedia.
- fuzzfactor 2y agoAlso legendary is the traditional GIGO which in some programming examples the FU is the garbage in and the BAR is the garbage out.
- Teknomancer 2y agoFOOcked-up Beyond All Recognition.
- pton_xd 2y agoI've always heard fubar originated as a backronym for the mispronounced German word "furchtbar," which means terrible but could be sort of interpreted as meaning "f'ed up." Fubar originated during WWII so it seems plausible atleast.
- cancerhacker 2y agoMy current chemo regime is FOLFIRI, one of the components of Which is Fluorouracil, and frequently written as “5-FU” and it’s a bugger.