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punishment for obnoxious behavior. This usage migrated to other circumstances, such as "I'm going to fod the process that is burning all the cycles." Compare gun. |
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In aviation, FOD means Foreign Object Damage, e.g., what happens when a jet engine sucks up a rock on the runway or a bird in flight. Finger of Death is a distressingly apt description of what this generally does to the engine. |
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fold case v. See smash case. This term tends to be used more by people who don't mind that their tools smash case. It also connotes that case is ignored but case distinctions in data processed by the tool in question aren't destroyed. |
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followup n. On Usenet, a posting generated in response to another posting (as opposed to a reply, which goes by email rather than being broadcast). Followups include the ID of the parent message in their headers; smart news-readers can use this information to present Usenet news in 'conversation' sequence rather than order-of-arrival. See thread. |
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fontology n. [XEROX PARC] The body of knowledge dealing with the construction and use of new fonts (e.g., for window systems and typesetting software). It has been said that fontology recapitulates file-ogeny. |
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[Unfortunately, this reference to the embryological dictum that "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is not merely a joke. On the Macintosh, for example, System 7 has to go through contortions to compensate for an earlier design error that created a whole different set of abstractions for fonts parallel to 'files' and 'folders' ESR] |
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foo /foo/ 1. interj. Term of disgust. 2. Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything, esp. programs and files (esp. scratch files). 3. First on the standard list of metasyntactic variables used in syntax examples. See also bar, baz, qux, quux, corge, grault, garply, waldo, fred, plugh, xyzzy, thud. |
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The etymology of hackish 'foo' is obscure. When used in connection with 'bar' it is generally traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym FUBAR ('Fucked Up Beyond All Repair'), later bowdlerized to foobar. (See also FUBAR.) |
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However, the use of the word 'foo' itself has more complicated antecedents, including a long history in comic strips and cartoons. The old "Smokey Stover" comic strips by Bill Holman often included the word 'FOO', in particular on license plates of cars; allegedly, 'FOO' and 'BAR' |
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