Miles Bader <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > FWIW, the `fu' in kung-fu means something like style or technique, so > apt-fu sort of makes sense if you think of as a tool for doing cool > things using the power of apt... :-)
I'm afraid that although the character `fu' has many meanings, but style or technique isn't one of them. Here are the rough translations of the various meanings of `fu' in my dictionary: a1) Opposite of a woman, that is, a man. a2) An adult man. a3) A farming method in the Zhou dynasty (1000BC-221BC). b1) Pronoun in the second person. b2) Demonstrative prnoun, as in `this' or `these'. b3) Mortal man, as opposed to the supernatural. b4) Denotes exclamation at the end of a sentence. b5) Denotes interrogation at the end of a sentence. b6) Used in the beginning of a sentence, has no meaning. b7) Used in the middle of a sentence, has no meaning. The word kung-fu originally refers to the time consumed by performing tasks. The present-day meaning comes from the fact that martial art usually requires years/decades of training, which is a lot of kung-fu. In this sense the character has no meaning. Although kung-fu has also been used to refer to man-hours where `fu' presumably refers to man, but the only usage I know is from the Three Kingdoms period (~200AD) and it is probably not related to the present-day meaning. Therefore, `fu' has no meaning at all in kung-fu. So it is entirely appropriate to construct the word `apt-fu'. -- Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 is out! ( http://www.debian.org/ ) Email: Herbert Xu ~{PmV>HI~} <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/ PGP Key: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/pubkey.txt
