Skip to main content

Snafu & Fubar

A lot of words come from acronyms, like "scuba" ("Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus") or "radar" ("RAdio Detecting And Ranging"). Some of these catch on and some don't. My favorite pair is "snafu" ("Situation Normal, All Fouled Up") and "fubar" ("Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition"). They are both credited to the military, where a stressed-out acceptance of chaos is not unusual.

Those are the polite versions, of course. They're more commonly used with the F-word, which itself has a legend attached to it saying it was derived from "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge." But if the word was a recent construction, there wouldn't be related forms like fukka (Norwegian), focka (Swedish), fyke (Middle English), and other things that will get my blog blocked overseas. ;-)

Sometimes, word use or borrowing goes too far, and meaning begins to fail. Most tutorials on computer programming still use "foo" and "bar" to stand for variables, leading to code samples like "if foo then bar." This would make no sense at all to someone who doesn't get the reference. Then again, it doesn't make much sense even when you do know where it comes from.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Poor Frankenstein

Names can get mixed up, too. Real or fictional people can become legends, or end up garbled and forgotten. A classic case is poor Frankenstein. If you're picturing the big lumbering monster with the bolts in his neck ... oops. Frankenstein was the doctor who created the monster. The monster was simply known as "the monster" or "Frankenstein's Monster." Strangely, "Franken-" has become a prefix on its own. I've heard big ugly things named that way, from a Frankencouch to a Frankenpuppy. I wonder if this was urged along by the old FrankenBerry cereal? Sure is a weird thing to make a prefix out of, especially considering the original Franken- thing was not a monster, but a mad scientist. Now, where does Al Franken fit into all this?
2 comments
Read more

RULY, RECK, and RobWords

There is a certain amount of linguistic Zen that comes from playing simple word unscrambler games, spinning around the question of why some words are accepted and others are not.  A few nights back we played UNRULY, and for fun, I tried RULY on a whim, and the game accepted it, when I know other games have rejected it.  I tried explaining it to Anne.  It felt like a word to me, and it's in Merriam-Webster with the same example I thought of at the time: "I have seen some ruly crowds."  It turns out that MW has a fascinating story about these two words, see here .  "Ruly" did exist for centuries, got replaced by UNRULY, only to come back as a back-formation from UNRULY to fill the gap it once filled.   It turns out that these cases are considered "Lost positives", words where the positive root word has faded from usage while the negation of the word is still going strong.  Here is a video from RobWords that gives a good overview.  I have been enjoy...
Post a Comment
Read more

why not SQUUUSH?

There is a strange and cartoony clump of words centered around SQUISH, or the idea or sound of squishing things.  This includes SQUUSH, SQUSH, and SQUOOSH, and an Ngram view of these shows all kinds of ups and downs in the noise of word history ... The first of these to appear was SQUSH, around 1830, and it was used in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapter 29.  SQUUSH came about in 1850, peaked well below the others in 1970 and is headed down to obscurity these days, while SQUOOSH first gets a blip around 1880 and had a big upturn from 1950 to 2010, but it now sinking as, much to my surprise, SQUSH is taking off. Since these are all verbs, they have the full range of strange-looking endings which would be fun for a Scrabble night: SQUUSHED, SQUUSHES, SQUUSHING, SQUSHED, SQUSHES, SQUSHING, SQUOOSHED, SQUOOSHES, SQUOOSHING and can be turned into adjectives as SQUSHY, SQUUSHY and SQUOOSHY. OMG, it's never ending, there are comparative versions SQUSHIER, SQUUSHIER, SQUOOSHI...
Post a Comment
Read more