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Grievance
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FNORD:
1. A word used in electronic mail and news messages to tag utterances as surrealist mind-play or humour, especially in connection with Discordianism and elaborate conspiracy theories. "I heard that David Koresh is sharing an apartment in Argentina with Hitler. (Fnord.)" "Where can I fnord get the Principia Discordia from?"
2. A metasyntactic variable, commonly used by hackers with ties to Discordianism or the Church of the SubGenius.
The word "fnord" was invented in the "Illuminatus!" trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.
[Jargon File]
fnord
n. [from the "Illuminatus Trilogy"] 1. A word used in email and news postings to tag utterances as surrealist mind-play or humor, esp. in connection with Discordianism and elaborate conspiracy theories. "I heard that David Koresh is sharing an apartment in Argentina with Hitler. (Fnord.)" "Where can I fnord get the Principia Discordia from?" 2. A metasyntactic variable, commonly used by hackers with ties to Discordianism or the Church of the SubGenius
metasyntactic variable
Strictly, a variable used in metasyntax, but often used for any name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion. The word foo is the canonical example. To avoid confusion, hackers never (well, hardly ever) use "foo" or other words like it as permanent names for anything.
In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning with a metasyntactic-variable name is a scratch file that may be deleted at any time.
To some extent, the list of one's preferred metasyntactic variables is a cultural signature. They occur both in series (used for related groups of variables or objects) and as singletons. Here are a few common signatures:
foo, bar, baz, quux, quuux, quuuux...: MIT/Stanford usage, now found everywhere. At MIT (but not at Stanford), baz dropped out of use for a while in the 1970s and '80s. A common recent mutation of this sequence inserts qux before quux.
bazola, ztesch: Stanford (from mid-'70s on).
foo, bar, thud, grunt: This series was popular at CMU. Other CMU-associated variables include ack, barf, foo, and gorp.
foo, bar, fum: This series is reported to be common at Xerox PARC.
fred, barney: See the entry for fred. These tend to be Britishisms.
toto, titi, tata, tutu: Standard series of metasyntactic variables among francophones.
corge, grault, flarp: Popular at Rutgers University and among GOSMACS hackers.
zxc, spqr, wombat: Cambridge University (England).
shme: Berkeley, GeoWorks, Ingres. Pronounced /shme/ with a short /e/.
foo, bar, zot: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland.
blarg, wibble: New Zealand
Of all these, only "foo" and "bar" are universal (and baz nearly so). The compounds foobar and "foobaz" also enjoy very wide currency.
Some jargon terms are also used as metasyntactic names; barf and mumble, for example.
See also Commonwealth Hackish for discussion of numerous metasyntactic variables found in Great Britain and the Commonwealth.
[Jargon File]
metasyntax
Syntax used to describe syntax. The best known example is BNF and its variants such as EBNF.
A metasyntactic variable is a variable used in metasyntax
syn·tax Pronunciation Key (sntks)
n.
The study of the rules whereby words or other elements of sentence structure are combined to form grammatical sentences.
A publication, such as a book, that presents such rules.
The pattern of formation of sentences or phrases in a language.
Such a pattern in a particular sentence or discourse.
Computer Science. The rules governing the formation of statements in a programming language.
A systematic, orderly arrangement.
Backus-Naur Form (BNF)
(BNF, originally "Backus Normal Form") A formal metasyntax used to express context-free grammars. Backus Normal Form was renamed Backus-Naur Form at the suggestion of Donald Knuth.
BNF is one of the most commonly used metasyntactic notations for specifying the syntax of programming languages, command sets, and the like. It is widely used for language descriptions but seldom documented anywhere (how do you document a metasyntax?), so that it must usually be learned by osmosis (but see RFC 2234).
Consider this BNF for a US postal address:
::=
::= | "."
::= [] |
::= []
::= ","
This translates into English as: "A postal-address consists of a name-part, followed by a street-address part, followed by a zip-code part. A personal-part consists of either a first name or an initial followed by a dot. A name-part consists of either: a personal-part followed by a last name followed by an optional "jr-part" (Jr., Sr., or dynastic number) and end-of-line, or a personal part followed by a name part (this rule illustrates the use of recursion in BNFs, covering the case of people who use multiple first and middle names and/or initials). A street address consists of an optional apartment specifier, followed by a street number, followed by a street name. A zip-part consists of a town-name, followed by a comma, followed by a state code, followed by a ZIP-code followed by an end-of-line."
Note that many things (such as the format of a personal-part, apartment specifier, or ZIP-code) are left unspecified. These lexical details are presumed to be obvious from context or specified somewhere nearby.
There are many variants and extensions of BNF, possibly containing some or all of the regexp wild cards such as "*" or "+". EBNF is a common one. In fact the example above isn't the pure form invented for the ALGOL 60 report. "[]" was introduced a few years later in IBM's PL/I definition but is now universally recognised. ABNF is another extension.
(1997-11-23)
Church of the SubGenius
A mutant offshoot of Discordianism launched in 1981 as a spoof of fundamentalist Christianity by the "Reverend" Ivan Stang, a brilliant satirist with a gift for promotion. Popular among hackers as a rich source of bizarre imagery and references such as "Bob" the divine drilling-equipment salesman, the Benevolent Space Xists, and the Stark Fist of Removal. Much SubGenius theory is concerned with the acquisition of the mystical substance or quality of slack.
Home (http://sunsite.unc.edu/subgenius/slack.html)
Discordianism
/dis-kor'di-*n-ism/ The veneration of Eris, also known as Discordia; widely popular among hackers. Discordianism was popularised by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's novel "Illuminatus!" as a sort of self-subverting Dada-Zen for Westerners - it should on no account be taken seriously but is far more serious than most jokes. Consider, for example, the Fifth Commandment of the Pentabarf, from "Principia Discordia": "A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing What he Reads." Discordianism is usually connected with an elaborate conspiracy theory/joke involving millennia-long warfare between the anarcho-surrealist partisans of Eris and a malevolent, authoritarian secret society called the Illuminati.
See Religion, Church of the SubGenius, and ha ha only serious.
[Jargon File]
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