Jargon File

my digging in Jargon File


I was mostly fascinated with the different language use rather than a single word. perhaps because I used to work in language processing and had some experience on web data collection.

it was interesting to see how much original hacker language has impacted current web and youth language. actually about youth, I am not sure if youth language entered hacker language or other way around. because it is always youth speciality to play with language and make up new words and expressions. impact of programming logic on the way hackers communicate is a big one too.
this is my(!) impression in Jargon file:
foo bar
or

foobar: n.
[very common] Another widely used metasyntactic variable; see foo for etymology. Probably originally propagated through DECsystem manuals by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1960s and early 1970s; confirmed sightings there go back to 1972. Hackers do not generally use this to mean FUBAR in either the slang or jargon sense. See also Fred Foobar. In RFC1639, “FOOBAR” was made an abbreviation for “FTP Operation Over Big Address Records”, but this was an obvious backronym. It has been plausibly suggested that “foobar” spread among early computer engineers partly because of FUBAR and partly because “foo bar” parses in electronics techspeak as an inverted foo signal; if a digital signal is active low (so a negative or zero-voltage condition represents a "1") then a horizontal bar is commonly placed over the signal label.

when I was younger and I was doing my master in computational linguistics, I used to look for all sorts of regular expressions in web. very often I would find my answer with an example using "foobar"! I always wondered why foobar appears everywhere! and what does it mean. I even imagined that maybe there is a real place called "foo bar" ...