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In the 60's the belief was that they could not tolerate profanity. Or maybe it was that they'd tattle on the rest of us.

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There was a concept of treating women with respect.

That's a non-sequitur. There are plenty of other words that start with 'fu-'. It's also a loanword from Chinese.

And even if not, I haven't heard anyone describe the coinage 'fupa' as offensive.

To the downvoters: I said I don't find merit in the suggestion that using 'fu' (or 'foo' as a function name) would be considered to constitute profanity. When learning programming, I simply learned 'foo, 'bar' and 'baz' as silly-sounding example function names. I didn't make any connection from 'foo' in the CS context to 'fubar' in US military slang till over a decade later.

(Neglecting that there weren't many women in CS in the 1960s. I don't even see that the word-fragment would have been considered offensive in civilian context, esp. to non-US speakers of English)

In the 60s, women were generally infantilized, but I suspect the “it was done for the women” explanation for the drift of “fu” to the already-existing term “foo” once separate from the other part of “fubar” is a just-so story, rather than a historical fact.

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