FooBar is a classic name in program examples, documentation etc
(AmericanCulturalAssumption?). Some have been of the opinion that it's a cleaned up version of its cousin
FuBar, but this seems unlikely; its etymology appears to be quite different. The canonical sources of information about this are the
JargonFile at
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/F/foo.html and RFC 3092 (at numerous locations, one of which is
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3092.html.)
I enjoyed reading that it might have originated (in one of its streams of origin) in the German furchtbar
(furcht
means fright or terror and bar
is the adjective suffix for -able, so furchtbar
means 'terrible'). Then it certainly makes sense that in WWII the English speakers, who borrowed German language into their slang, would shift it to the slang and acronym form FUBAR (F---'ed Up Beyond All Recognition) to describe something in their situation. . . . The other streams of origin, backing into the comics of the 1920s and the Chinese fortune-cookie word Fu for happiness, are equally interesting.
In CS/hacker circles, foobar (and others) are known as
MetasyntacticVariables.
At work, we had a mascot named
FooBar. It was an insect (don't know which actually). --
AurelianoCalvo.
See:
FuBar (after bracing one's self)
CategoryAcronym,
CategoryIdiom