This past weekend my girlfriend asked what in the world the name of my blog meant. She said she didn’t understand the “Sweetness Without Context” sub title. After thinking about it for a minute I gave her an answer slightly less nerdy than this:

fooberry /foo – ber – ree/ jargon

1. A metasyntactic variable fruit used commonly* in computer science to represent a source of all natural, non-high fructose corn syrup, sugary sweetness.
2. A derivation of a street near where I live, Hackberry Dr.
3. A cool, at least to me, sounding blog name

* The term “commonly” is used for small definitions of the word common, meaning less than or equal to only one person.

None of that was much help, except maybe the last one. She still didn’t understand what I meant by “foo”. I decided to look up the etymology of “foo”, which was no help and even “foobar” had very little.

In technology, the word was probably originally propagated through system manuals by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1960s and early 1970s.

Even “FUBAR”, to which “foobar” is notsuppose to berelated, provided little certainy; however, one fact did stand out.

FUBAR may have been influenced by the German word furchtbar, meaning terrible. It is pronounced with a soft cht, and probably made the transition during World War II.

Maybe there is some lineage there after all. Knowing what is commonly implemented for “foo”, “terrible” is probably a good substitute. I wonder if the “Hello World” on the Enginma was written using furchtbar.

Noneof this has helped me explain “fooberry” to a non-techie. So basically, to me, “fooberry” is a term for something that sweetens whatever it is that you do.

That was actually much easier than explaining my last blog name: Ontological Reciprocity. That would take much longer, and I’m not sure I even totally understand it correctly, but it sure sounds cool.