On 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.

I 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-g...

People 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.

Well Walter, ask yourself why Kinnard, who was in the room at the time and Harper, who delivered the message, and Premetz, the non-commissioned medic who translated it for the Germans, all give repeated official accounts and interviews that contradict the account of your father, who by your own admission merely "worked for the general briefly".

Is it all a grand conspiracy to protect the good name and reputation of McAuliffe?

I'll say no more.

My father had a first hand account from McAuliffe, like the other three, and had no reason whatsoever to misrepresent it.

> Is it all a grand conspiracy to protect the good name and reputation of McAuliffe?

A small conspiracy is not at all far-fetched. First off, it's an inconsequential thing. Secondly, if one of the three told the truth, then he'd be called a liar by the other two. Who needs that? If you're in the military, you don't get ahead by contradicting the narrative. (My dad found that out the hard way - he was punished more than once for not writing reports that fit the narrative.)

For a grand conspiracy, consider how long Biden's staff held out insisting that Biden was sharp as a tack and writing off contrary reports as disinformation.

The most compelling bit about my evidence is the frankly laughable idea that a GI would use the word "nuts".

P.S. I understand you have no particular reason to believe me, and if I were in your shoes I wouldn't, either.

If there is any takeaway here, it would be that historical accounts are always suspect. History is written by the victors, as they say.

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.

Next you’re gonna tell me it wasn’t “damn the torpedoes”

Maybe the communication went like this:

Germans: "Wie Sie vermutlich wissen, sind Sie und Ihre Leute von allen Seiten umstellt. Wir gehen davon aus, dass Sie bereit sind, sich zu ergeben. Bitte bestätigen Sie dies."

MCAuliffe: "Dies Nutz"

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.

There was a concept of treating women with respect.

That'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.

To 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. I simply learned 'foo, 'bar' and 'baz' as silly-sounding function names. I didn't make any connection from 'foo' in the CS context to 'fubar' in US military slang till 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)

In 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.

Back in the 1960s United States, women were often perceived as more sensitive to public profanity, compared to men of the same age.

Is it not clear what “f” and “u” is short for?

Of course it is. What's not clear is what that has to do with women.

I 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.

This is a sexist statement

It’s a discussion about a sexist environment. Catch up

Describing the factual sexist environment that existed in a prior time (or, hell, the ones that exist today) is not itself sexist.

It’s a fact the environment was sexist.

Everything else is speculation unless their is some evidence that women’s complaints were the driving factor of a change in policy rather than, say, the infantilization of women or a sexist expectation that women would take exception to it.

How so?

Very sexist. Women were not only expected to never cuss, but also to pretend as if they had never even heard such awful words.

https://youtu.be/Cq-If5vVvcc

> 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.

Can you elaborate on that? My goal was to be as clear as possible and leave minimal room for misinterpretation.

> societal expectations historically placed on women, they’ve typically had to be “the adult in the room.”

I think it was the opposite; they were infantilzed and sensitive, considered liable to faint or have a bout of hysteria. They were to be protected. Swearing might upset a woman.

Men had final authority over them in many cases. For example, often women couldn't get jobs without their husband's permission.

Women were sometimes the source of a sensitive, compassionate, nurting viewpoint, a balance to the man's roughness. She might appeal to him, but it was his decision.

People had different values than you do in the past. They also have different values right now.

It's clear. Fucked Up

'F--- you'

In this case the u stands for “up”: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fubar

No

Because they are subject both to sexual harassment and to higher expectations, including "professionalism" (not using profanity at the workplace in this specific case).

This isn't an answer to the question.

Smug responses like this just means you don't actually have a point.

How 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.

I 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.

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.

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.

Oh, 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.

And 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.

That part of the comment is not true.

> Why would women in particular object to "fu" and not "foo"?

Honestly I don't know pussy.

Because fu.

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'.

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

> 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 [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 [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 [4] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5458

For 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.

Also legendary is the traditional GIGO which in some programming examples the FU is the garbage in and the BAR is the garbage out.

FOOcked-up Beyond All Recognition.

I'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.

My current chemo regime is FOLFIRI, one of the components of Which is Fluorouracil, and frequently written as “5-FU” and it’s a bugger.