Computer geeks need to picket their local DMV office: The state has ruled that FOOBAR cannot be a vanity license plate.
Presumably they confused it with FUBAR, meaning “effed-up beyond all recognition” – whereas FOOBAR is, of course, placeholder terminology long enshrined in geek-speak.
(This story has a bunch of other rejected vanity plate applications)
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We should be outraged! I looked up FOOBAR on Google, and it claims that it found “About 8,170,000 results (0.83 seconds)”
Google’s counts are usually wildly inflated, one of several reasons it means nothing.
OTOH, searching for my references to it with |foobar “werme”| yields some 416 hits. Oh, the first one goes back to the early days of the ARPAnet and there are references to two other Wermes (there aren’t many of us!), oh my – something I posted in 1998 (but someone else used foobar in his UUCP Email address).
Excuse me, I have to go on a stroll down memory lane.
Maybe my daughters will stumble across this story 20 years from now!
BTW, foo and bar came from MIT as far as I know. Stanford used mumble and fratz, CMU used ork and ding. MIT got it right.
An April article about a current vanity plate legal tussle in CA: https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/dmv-vanity-plate-lawsuit-california/
The 2014 NH case (“COPSLIE”) is mentioned.
Last I checked, I noticed that “IMVAIN” is available and (apparently) kosher in NH.
VANITY is also available, to my surprise. I assumed some recursion fan would have claimed it.