81–90 of 150 posts
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 kne…
Why would women in particular object to "fu" and not "foo"?
It blows me away that "The Jargon File" is not required canon. Well, it can be anachronistic and old-school-nerd-bro coded, but there's some primal stuff in there http://catb.org/jargon/html/
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In the 1940s, the Army used a phonetic alphabet starting Able, Baker, Charlie. My late father was on the first two postwar atomic bomb tests (the first after Trinity, and at Hiroshima, Nagasaki) which were Able and Baker. Able was an air burst over Bikini (thus the name of the swimsuit). Baker, the water burst, was the world's first atomic disaster; as a result of Baker, the third scheduled test Charlie was cancelled…
The change from able... to alpha... was a NATO thing. some European countries don't use the "a" in "able", so it was changed to the "a" in "alpha"
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In 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.
There was a concept of treating women with respect.
And even if not, I haven't heard anyone describe the coinage 'fupa' as offensive.
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I limit swearing in mixed company and I'm not even that old.
I 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.
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.
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NATO phonetic alphabet is used in all areas where you have to say letters over voice. One character variable names for temp or iterator values are everywhere in programming. But I've never ever encountered one spelled out as a full transcriptions of the NATO phonetic alphabet like alfa, bravo, charlie. Exception is alpha for probability/statistics.
> NATO phonetic alphabet is used in all areas where you have to say letters over voice. Not all. Military definitely favors NATO, but there are other phonetic alphabets in use. In particular, at least in the US, fire/ems personnel (and sometimes also law enforcement) use alternatives. The one that goes Adam, Boy (or Baker), Charlie, David, Edward, Frank, ... is still widely used. I've also known agencies to use a mix…
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Why would women in particular object to "fu" and not "foo"?
In 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I 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.
I 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.