What is the origin of this term as an “clean” alternate for “what the fuck”? Did it actually start in the military, or was the use of that military code later adapted by civilians for this purpose?
“I’m hip. I understand my kids’ lingo - LOL for Laugh Out Loud, WTF for Why the Face?”
-Phil from Modern Family.
I assume it’s just military speak for the acronym using the phonetic radio words for each letter. (Military I assume because the military use that radio alphabet all the time) WFT goes back a decade or more as an acronym. Being clever to say something impolite is old as time. SNAFU for example, is allegedly a WWII acronym.
WTF is a lot more recent than SNAFU. While the military does love its TLAs, WTF became popular in the early days of the internet. It didn’t always stand for What The Fuck though back then. Sometimes it was Who The Fuck or Where The Fuck. The What The Fuck meaning was always common, but didn’t become quite as standard until the 1990s or so.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is just spelling out WTF in the NATO phonetic alphabet. Poking around on google, I don’t see any evidence for the military version coming first (either that or my google-fu is failing me). So it looks like the civilian version came first in this case.
SNAFU and FUBAR on the other hand both originated in the military and date back to WW2.
The acronym for “See you next time” never made it to the civilian world …
Sierra Yankee November Tango?
I think he means the sorta-txtspeak version that starts out CU …
e.g. CUL8R works OK. Watchwolf49’s words, not so much. 
ETA: Not sure which of us got whooshed here. But surely somebody will need it explained to them. Yeah, that’s right… somebody. 
My understanding is some female Major just happened to be in the crypto vault during HJ and saw that acronym and just hit the ceiling. So we had to use CUL BTT (= See you later and back to traffic) under threat of Article 15 punishment. Oh, five bit ASCII, no ampersand.
So unreasonable …
Not me. See the smiley?
November Mike.
Heard this many times: “God damn it, BOHICA!”
Around here, TTFN stands for “ta ta for now”, which is about the same thing.
Wonderful! You should begin to replace using “TTFN” with “See You Next Time” (or See You Next Tuesday) from now on.