The stress and structure of "Foo Fighter"
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Is it a "foo fighter" a fighter that fights foos? Or is it a fighter that IS foo? This should show up in the stress pattern, as in the difference between a "German teacher" as a teacher who teaches German (normally with stress on the first word), or a teacher who IS German (normally with stress on the second word).
Dave Grohl clears this up for us in a brief video clip:
Wikipedia explains the musical background:
Nirvana disbanded after the death of Kurt Cobain in April 1994. Grohl received offers to work with various artists. Press rumors indicated he might join Pearl Jam, and he almost accepted a position as drummer in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Grohl later said: "I was supposed to just join another band and be a drummer the rest of my life. I thought that I would rather do what no one expected me to do." He instead entered Robert Lang Studios in October 1994 to record 15 of his own songs. With the exception of a guitar part on "X-Static", played by Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs, Grohl played every instrument and sang every vocal. He completed an album's worth of material in five days and handed out cassette copies of the sessions to his friends for feedback.
Grohl hoped to stay anonymous and release the recordings in a limited run under the name Foo Fighters, taken from foo fighter, a World War II term for unidentified flying objects. He hoped the name would lead listeners to assume the music was made by several people. He said later: "Had I actually considered this to be a career, I probably would have called it something else, because it's the stupidest fucking band name in the world." The demo tape circulated in the industry, creating interest among record labels.
Here's Wikipedia on the phrase's WWII origin:
The nonsense word "foo" emerged in popular culture during the early 1930s, first being used by cartoonist Bill Holman, who peppered his Smokey Stover fireman cartoon strips with "foo" signs and puns.
The term "foo" was borrowed from Smokey Stover by a radar operator in the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, Donald J. Meiers, who, according to most 415th members, gave the foo fighters their name. Meiers was from Chicago and was an avid reader of Holman's strip, which was run daily in the Chicago Tribune. Smokey Stover's catch-phrase was "where there's foo, there's fire". In a mission debriefing on the evening of November 27, 1944, Frederic "Fritz" Ringwald, the unit's S-2 Intelligence Officer, stated that Meiers and Pilot Lt. Ed Schleuter had sighted a red ball of fire that appeared to chase them through a variety of high-speed maneuvers. Ringwald said that Meiers was extremely agitated and had a copy of the comic strip tucked in his back pocket. He pulled it out and slammed it down on Ringwald's desk and said, "[I]t was another one of those fuckin' foo fighters!" and stormed out of the debriefing room.
There's more from Time Magazine in 1945, and from ScreenRant in 2024. It's clear from those articles that "foo" (whatever its lexical category and meaning) is modifying the noun "fighter", as in "jet fighter", rather than being the object of the verb "fight", as in "fire fighter" — though they have nothing to say about the stress pattern.
For a (long but accessible) discussion of the morpho-phonological issues involved, see "The Stress and Structure of Modified Noun Phrases in English", 1992.
Don said,
August 5, 2025 @ 4:12 pm
My father, who served in World War Two, referred to men's cologne as foo-foo juice. I have no idea whether that was related to this foo. Googling tells me that it is widespread enough to be a recognizable slang term.
Gabriel Holbrow said,
August 5, 2025 @ 5:43 pm
I read in a book sometime when I was a kid (I don't remember what book though) that the WWII foo fighters were named feu fighters because they were balls of fire, and "foo" was just how the Americans spelled (and pronounced) the French word. It's a plausible etymology, but apparently false, given the evidence of the connection to Smokey Stover.
David Morris said,
August 5, 2025 @ 6:15 pm
Two posts previous to this has 'boat people'. Are they people who people boats, or people who ARE boats? (non-serious question not seeking an answer)
ajay said,
August 6, 2025 @ 10:13 am
My father, who served in World War Two, referred to men's cologne as foo-foo juice.
Are you sure it was foo-foo and not frou-frou, which is a French-derived term meaning "overly ornamented and feminine"?