Well, I appeal to Wikipedia:
>>It is reported on the website www.snafu.com, with background to
verify authenticity, that Don Taylor and his buddy Johnny Paup of >>the
Army Signal Corps came up with the term at Camp San Luis Obispo in 1941.
They were using a relatively new code converter that >>converted
messages into five-letter code groups. One night in camp they were
making sentences out of the five letter groups the >>machine printed
out. One of the code groups was SNAFU and Don Taylor came up with the
meaning.
>>Electronics engineers say that SNAFU and FUBAR
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fubar#FUBAR> were used before the war by
repairmen sent out to repair telephone booths
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_booth>. They >>had to report the
situation at arrival to the scene, often on a very bad line, so they
developed these acronyms to make themselves >>understood. [...]^
>>Snafu is also used in the Illuminatus trilogy <<
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminatus_trilogy>
In the London subculture I had access to in the early 70s, when I was
living in Frankfurt but going to London regularly to visit my son,
everyone was reading *Illuminatus* & saying SNAFU. I had never heard it
before.
I rest my case, m'lud.
emjay
Peter Cudmore wrote:
>Yeah, my intuition is that 'situation normal' is an American-style locution,
>not something that would come naturally to a Brit -- though who is to say
>about the vocabulary of soldiers? The AFU part is obviously lingua franca,
>as in 'The fucking thing is fucking fucked'.
>
>I doubt the Illuminatus connection, though -- wasn't that FUCKUP, the
>acronymic name for a computer?
>
>P
>
>
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