"Fnord" (/fnɔːrd/) is a word coined in 1965 by Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill in the Principia Discordia. It entered the popular culture after appearing in The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) of satirical and parody 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 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, and prevents rational consideration of the text in which it appears.
The word is often used in newsgroup and hacker culture to indicate that someone is being ironic, humorous, or surreal.[1] Often placed at the end of a statement in brackets (fnord) to make the ironic purpose clear, it is a label that may be applied to any random or surreal sentence, coercive subtext, or anything jarringly out of context (intentionally or not). It is sometimes used as a metasyntactic variable in programming.[2] It appears in the Church of the SubGenius recruitment film Arise! and has been used in the SubGenius newsgroup alt.slack.[citation needed]