"Fnord" (/ f n ɔr d /) is a term coined in 1965 by Kerry Thornley and Gregory Hill in the Discordian religious text Principia Discordia. He entered popular culture after appearing on The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) of satirical and parodic conspiracy fiction novels by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. In these novels, the interjection "fnord" is given hypnotic power over the unenlightened, and children in elementary school are taught to be unable to see the word consciously. For the rest of their lives, each appearance of the word subconsciously generates a feeling of malaise and confusion, preventing rational consideration of the text in which it appears.
The word was used in newsgroups and hacker culture to indicate irony, humor or surrealism. The placement at the end of a bracketed statement (fnord) explicitly marks the intention and can be applied to any random or surreal phrase, coercive subtext or anything irritatingly out of context, intentional or not. It is sometimes used as a meta-syntactic variable in programming. Fnord appears in the SubGenius Church recruitment film, Arise! and was used in the newsgroup SubGenius alt.slack.
Origins
The word was coined as a nonsensical term with religious undertones in the Discordian parody of religious texts, Principia Discordia (1965) by Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill, but was popularized by The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) of satirical conspiracy fiction novels by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.[3] Illuminatus! was produced, in the United Kingdom, as a cycle of plays by anarchic theatre director Ken Campbell and his Jungian Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool. The plays further popularized the term.
In the novel trilogy (and the plays), the interjection "fnord" is given hypnotic power over the unenlightened. Under the Illuminati program, children in grade school are taught to be unable to consciously see the word "fnord". For the rest of their lives, every appearance of the word subconsciously generates a feeling of unease and confusion, preventing rational consideration of the text it appears in. The uneasiness and confusion create a perpetual low-level state of fear in the populace. The government acts on the premise that a fearful populace keeps them in power.
In the Shea/Wilson construct, fnords—occurrences of the word "fnord"—are scattered liberally in the text of newspapers and magazines, causing fear and anxiety in those following current events. However, there are no fnords in the advertisements, encouraging a consumerist society. The exclusion of the text from rational consciousness also enables the Illuminati to publish messages to each other in newspapers, etc., without fear that other people will be aware of them. It is implied in the books that fnord is not the actual word used for this task, but merely a substitute, since most readers would be unable to see the actual word.
To "see the fnords" means to be unaffected by the supposed hypnotic power of the word or, more loosely, of other fighting words. The term may also be used to refer to the experience of becoming aware of a phenomenon's ubiquity after first observing it. The phrase "I have seen the fnords" was graffitied on a British railway bridge throughout the 1980s and 1990s, until the bridge was upgraded. The bridge, located between Earlsdon and Coventry city centre, is known locally as "Anarchy Bridge".[4] The bridge and the phrase were mentioned in the novel A Touch of Love by Jonathan Coe. You can see an image of the "I HAVE SEEN THE FNORDS" graffiti captured on October 26, 1982 by Walwyn here.
Usage
The lack of a clear definition of the word, and its popularity among certain groups on the internet, allowed it to be appropriated as a placeholder word (a metasyntactic variable) in computer programming, particularly by those with ties to Discordianism or the Church of the SubGenius It has also been found useful as the name for a "techno cultural" conference, computer programs, and as a general placeholder word in computing literature.
Fnord! is the name of a (now defunct) freeware NT web server created by Brian Morin in 1995 and transferred to the care of Stephen Kazmierczak in 1997 when Brian was initiated into the summer Internet Server group at Microsoft. In his final transmission, Brian cites imaginary legal backlash from the established tech giant as the reason for abandoning development of the free Fnord! server solution. Microsoft released Windows 95 and the accompanying Microsoft Network in the same time frame, which was seen as a play by the tech giant to monopolize the emerging online experience of dial-up users by introducing a toll road style business plan for accessing the world's information. Fnord! was as a free and open source direct competitor to the then nascent Microsoft Personal Web Server (PWS) for Windows 95. A comparison of the features of Fnord! and the Microsoft PWS can be made by exploring the Fnord! server documentation here: Fnord! A Windows 95 Web Server.
Paulo Goode, a typeface designer from West Cork, Ireland, created a humanist serif font named Fnord in 2016 which contains 23 fonts in five weights. The geometry of the upper case ‘O’ is drawn on an axis of 23 degrees while the lower case ‘o’ falls on a 17-degree axis. The 23 / 17 numerology is reflective of similar numerical themes from The Illuminatus! Trilogy.
