when some of the edge is gone

Laura…I do think that ole man Spooner was as easily amused with language as I am. To me, it brings language a cut above the slapstick level. It’s a little more work than watching someone slip and fall on the ice.

And mimi….here…eat my moustache…it’s not the least bit salty…..it’s more like licorice . Although I haven’t grown one in years…it may be more salt and peppery now. Yes…I agree….more than our buds change as we age.

This morning while walking the dogs I was thinking about spoonerisms. I vaguely remembered a silly joke about a foo bird. It was one of those moral of the story kind of joke that was probably popular in the early 60’s. And the joke would end  with this question: Do you know what the moral of the story is? And this particular ending was: if the foo shits wear it.
 (if the shoe fits wear it) Thus, the spoonerism….and the humor. Anyway…I’m not one to rest easy so when I returned home, I googled foo and this is what came up: No mention of a bird though.

foo jargon
/foo/ A sample name for absolutely anything, especially programs and files (especially scratch files). 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.
The etymology of “foo” is obscure. When used in connection with “bar”
it is generally traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym FUBAR, later bowdlerised to foobar.
However, the use of the word “foo” itself has more complicated
antecedents, including a long history in comic strips and cartoons.
“FOO” often appeared in the “Smokey Stover” comic strip by Bill Holman.
This surrealist strip about a fireman appeared in various American
comics including “Everybody’s” between about 1930 and 1952. FOO was
often included on licence plates of cars and in nonsense sayings in the
background of some frames such as “He who foos last foos best” or “Many
smoke but foo men chew”.
Allegedly, “FOO” and “BAR” also occurred
in Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” strips. In the 1938 cartoon “The Daffy Doc”, a
very early version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying “SILENCE IS
FOO!”. Oddly, this seems to refer to some approving or positive
affirmative use of foo. It has been suggested that this might be
related to the Chinese word “fu” (sometimes transliterated “foo”),
which can mean “happiness” when spoken with the proper tone (the
lion-dog guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese restaurants are
properly called “fu dogs”).
Earlier versions of this entry
suggested the possibility that hacker usage actually sprang from “FOO,
Lampoons and Parody”, the title of a comic book first issued in
September 1958, a joint project of Charles and Robert Crumb. Though
Robert Crumb (then in his mid-teens) later became one of the most
important and influential artists in underground comics, this venture
was hardly a success; indeed, the brothers later burned most of the
existing copies in disgust. The title FOO was featured in large letters
on the front cover. However, very few copies of this comic actually
circulated, and students of Crumb’s “oeuvre” have established that this
title was a reference to the earlier Smokey Stover comics.
An old-time member reports that in the 1959 “Dictionary of the TMRC Language”, compiled at TMRC there was an entry that went something like this:
FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase “FOO MANE PADME
HUM.” Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning.
For more about the legendary foo counters, see TMRC. Almost the entire staff of what became the MIT AI LAB was involved with TMRC, and probably picked the word up there.
Another correspondant cites the nautical construction “foo-foo” (or
“poo-poo”), used to refer to something effeminate or some technical
thing whose name has been forgotten, e.g. “foo-foo box”, “foo-foo
valve”. This was common on ships by the early nineteenth century.
Very probably, hackish “foo” had no single origin and derives through
all these channels from Yiddish “feh” and/or English “fooey”.
[The Jargon File]
(1998-04-16)