Profile that just might be one of the rare ones that should be deleted

Question

This person is a family member who signed up in 2014 and made exactly 1 contribution.  The person's name is a phrase commonly used by programmers to represent a sort of generic variable, therefore I strongly suspect that it is not the real name of a person.

Comments

Lynda, I am going to remove the tag you added because "profiles" is for attention from the Profile Improvement Project and that is not applicable to this question.

I did not use a tag because there isn't one that is really appropriate - if there is some rule that I don't know about that requires all questions to have at least one tag, then I suppose unknowns would probably be best for this one.

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Gaile, how in the dickens did you find this? Just curious!

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I was answering a question someone asked about her ancestors named Bär and/or Baer because I remembered (somewhere in the back of my geriatrically inhibited mind) having done profiles about 3 years ago for several members of a family with that last name who are part of the Holocaust project.  I suggested she do a search on the family name to see what profiles are already here.  I did the search myself, to be sure of what I was recommending.  That's where I found dear old Foo languishing.

Answer 1

I think that Foo is going to be very upset when he reads this.  I don't know why he registered with his nickname Foo, when everyone who knows the family knows his FNAB is FU.  He was named after his relatives Sna Fu, Sus Fu, and Tar Fu.  This was quite a patriotic family as they all served in the U.S. Army.  

Comments

Kerry, I LUV your analysis!  It's soooooo nice to meet you and I hope we connect sometime soon so that I can start calling you cuz!

EDITED TO ADD:
I just did further research, starting from your link to Army acronyms, where I found a disambiguation statement about Fu and Foo, with a link to the Foo Bar page,which is about his being a true geek.  I guess we need to be careful of conflating these two.

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When I first came across the term in software, it started with FU and appears to have changed in the next generation of software people when people only heard the term but not the spelling.

Answer 2

I believe that my father knew old Fu when he served in the Pacific in WWII!  He mentioned him in his few stories about life in the Army in the 1940s.

Comments

Robin, I would have loved to hear your father's stories!  I am married to a retired Air Force fighter pilot and they have a language all their own.  I spent my career as a military and intelligence contractor, most of it in support of the Navy, where I learned a whole new vocabulary, courtesy of Navy chiefs, who I consider the second most colorful, surpassed only by the Seals, some of whom I also had the privilege to work with.  Now I tell everyone that I only know 2 kinds of words - 4 letter and 4 syllable.

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Well, Bob was reticent about his life in the Pacific.  He served on Pelilieu and was one of the few that survived that island, that turned out to have no purpose.  He did tell me that Fu Bar was a major part of the experience, though, and that he had empathy for all that encountered him.