This used to be a regular expression on alt.fan.cecil-adams but I don’t recall seeing it here. Usually written as OTB:IF
Another old expression was “umscribe” first used when a thin skinned poster wanted to unsubscribe from the newsgroup (you don’t subscribe in the first place) and miss spelled it. It was put to good use whenever a celebrity died such as:
Umscribe: Anthony Bourdain.
Any other fondly remembered sayings from AFC-A?
Dennis
Funny, that was Cecil’s Eskimo translation of “Look at all this f&^%$# snow.”
I was going to say the same thing about the line. My personal favorite.
I wasn’t part of the AFC-A.
And in turn the newsgroup turned the phrase so that OTB:IF was the fauxkimo translation of the net initialism RFTM.
^ I’m still relatively a Net Noob, so it took me a few minutes to assimilate your statement, but I finally got the -gist, thanks.
Was If ignorance were corn flakes, you’d be General Mills on this AFC-A dealie?
No, it was the “translation” of, “Read the fucking book”.
Dennis
I had NO idea alt.fan.cecil-adams still existed. I googled it (makes sense, huh?), assuming I’d find an archive of vintage posts, maybe from the AOL days. Figured I’d catch up on what some Olde Dopers thought of that new Fight Club movie.
But what’s this? A Pecker vs Bezos thread? OMG, it lives!
Got the order of the letters wrong, please RTFM.
How does OTB:if equall read the manual? My mind isn’t parsing.
The “it fornicates” part was supposedly the closest thing Cecil could find to meaning “fucking” in an Eskimo language, because it is saying the snow is literally fucking. So if “observe the snow: it fornicates” is a liberal translation of “look at all this fucking snow”, then by extension, “observe the book: it fornicates” would be an equivalent translation of “look at the fucking book.” While it doesn’t exactly mean “read”, I think it’s close enough.
Got it, thanks.
What the Hot Sodomy Lesson are we talking about? 
Here’s a link to thecolumn, from 1979. Looks like someone cleaned up the language, or we are all mis-remembering. Kinda hard to say because “shit” is left as is just a little later in the column.
The column has been sanitized. I have the original book right in front of me and it says “fucking” in the appropriate spot.