the article stated that fubar meant “fucked up beyond all recognition”. That may be true BUT, a friend of mine navigated a B-24 named "tarfu baby on the Ploesti raid and he said that tarfu meant “things are really fucked up” and fubar meant “fucked up beyond all repair”.
Welcome to the Straight Dope.
The R can stand for many things. It isn’t like there was an official War Department Committee on Obscene Acronyms. For the record, I’ve only heard it as “recognition,” and my father might have taught your friend to fly.
My father was in the OSS, and reported it as “recognition”. He agreed on “tarfu”. Of course, “fouled” is often substituted in all three (including “snafu”).
I suppose this is in reference to What’s the origin of “notary sojac”?.
Back in the sixties when I was an innocent college student a professor once wrote “fubar” across one of my test answers. When I asked him what that meant, he said it was “…beyond all recall”.
Quoting a portion of the noted column that caught my jaded elder-geek eye:
I’m pretty sure “foo” in the context of a metasyntactic variable predates MS-DOS by a fair bit. RFC 269 predate MS-DOS’ initial release by a decade, and it’s laced with “foo” and “bar” placeholder references.
RFC 3902 purports to be an Etymology of “Foo”. Very interesting reading. Eutychus may have found this researching his column.
Missed the edit window. ETA: or maybe not. Both the RFC and the column have first-week-of-April 2001 pub dates. Unless Euty is one of the RFC authors or otherwise read it quickly before the widespread advent of WWW publication of RFCs, I don’t know how he could have incorporated the info from the RFC into a column published two days later.
“…beyond all relief.” is how I used/heard/learned it in the USN.
All print cites from WWII use “recognition.”