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Foo Bar came from model trains at MIT

blog.skill-issue.dev

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Re: Foo Bar came from model trains at MIT

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post #2

neat. I always figured it was just a tongue-in-cheek purposeful corruption of the 1940s FUBAR military jargon, but admittedly I never went searching for the origin.

FOO came first in the 1930s; it was pervasively used by the Smokey Stover comic strip. Then, students reinterpreted german furchtbar (awful) as the spoken term FOO-BAR. That became the backronym FUBAR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2pljKyCgwc