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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.

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