[najarvg]

Clearly OT but the excessive reliance on foo and bar in many of my early C lang learning examples really slowed down my ability to transfer said techniques into something meaningful. Eventually one of my friends working in the Visual C++ team (I'm dating myself here) explained the connection of foo and bar to fubar and kind of felt like this!

[eigenloss]

I had the same experience; that's mostly what I'm referencing. Trying to use things like The Hacker's Dictionary (largely in-jokes, bad jargon, and obnoxious circular definitions) to clear it up made the problem worse. I get that it's just a humor book, but still.