It’s humbling when you discover there’s a popular social phrase, which has been in widespread usage for at least three years, that you haven’t even heard about — especially if you’re trying to foster the image that you’re hip, cool, and fully up-to-date with modern trends.

Such was my fate this morning, when a Slashdot (”News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters.”) headline appeared (along with a few dozen other news headlines) on the home page of my web browser. The headline was entitled “College Freshmen Struggle With Tech Literacy,” and it summarized an article in E-Commerce News (whatever that is) entitled “Generation M’s Surprising Struggle With Tech Literacy.” I resisted the urge to delve into the details of what “Generation M” means (apparently it means kids born after 1985, for reasons I don’t understand), and focused instead on the news that only 49 percent of the students who participated in a national test could evaluate a set of Web sites for objectivity, authority, and timeliness; and only 35 percent could correctly narrow an overly broad Internet search.

Okay, fine … but for some reason, I continued on, and skimmed through the comments and responses to the article. And I found that at 2:54 AM, “dangitman” had posted a comment that said,

“Those links (at least the first couple of pages) don’t contain instructions on how to get out of a paper bag. They are just sites that refer to paper bags, or use the phrase “couldn’t $$$$$ his/her way out of a paper bag.” So what is the magic Google-fu required to Google one’s way out of a paper bag?”

Maybe it was the politely obscured obscenity that caught my attention; or maybe it was my knee-jerk reaction to the phrase “paper bag,” when anyone who knows anything about anything knows that the appropriate phrase is “wet paper bag.” But in any case, I was intrigued by the phrase “Google-fu,” and silently congratulated dangitman for having created a new, artistically appealing phrase.

But wait: what if dangitman wasn’t just making up the phrase? Surely it wasn’t already part of the standard Internet/Web lexicon? Could it be? Could I have missed something? How would I ever know? Well …. duh! why not Google the phrase? Egad! In a mere 0.22 seconds, Google provided 63,600 hits on the search term, including a page titled “What Does Google-Fu Mean?” and Urban Dictionary’s definition of the term and Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror page of a couple dozen specific examples of google-fu-ness. As you might expect, the basic meaning (as explained by someone named Rev. Syung Myung Me, a 25 year old Seattle resident whose real name is Matt) is “‘Google-Fu’ is merely being able to find things quickly and easily, particularly difficult things, on Google. And the ‘-fu’ comes from ‘Kung Fu’; the ‘google-fu’ phrase is sort of an outgrowth of the whole usage of ‘ninja’ to mean ’someone who is hyper-competent.’”

Well, I should have been prepared for all of this, having just read the front-page article in the “Week in Review” section of today’s December 24, 2006 Sunday New York Times, entitled “A Buzz Saw of Buzzwords.” The article noted several new buzzwords that appeared in 2006, including “Decider” and “Macaca” (which show up here and here in Wikipedia). I have to admit that I had not heard of “sanctimommy” or “hubby-sitter” or some of the other terms and phrases chronicled in the article; but the technical/geeky phrases (e.g., “YouTube” being used as a verb) were familiar, thank goodness.

Anyway, Google-fu is now part of my vocabulary. And just to be safe, I googled a few other obvious variations: yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as MySpace-Fu, Amazon-Fu, and eBay-Fu. And Excel-Fu and Outlook-Fu and Windows-Fu. I’m sure the list goes on and on; there’s probably a whole universe of fu-ness that I’ve known nothing about for lo these many past years.

The mind boggles…