Whether or not it's true, I think it's a pretty good story because it aligns BAR with "Beyond All Recognition", which is exactly the point of a metasyntactic va

Whether or not it's true, I think it's a pretty good story because it aligns BAR with "Beyond All Recognition", which is exactly the point of a metasyntactic variable: to be so separate that that context is unrecognizable. Obfuscating the context is what F's it Up. Usually that's a problematic thing, but in the case of foo and bar, the F'ed Up version is maybe better.