Suffix-fu

A few weeks ago I was reading Andrew Leonard's column at Salon.com and came across the following sentence (about the new function for biking directions on Google Maps):

     My hope is that a properly designed and administered
     system will marry Google's algorithmic-fu with localized
     human intelligence and, over time, we will get a platform
     of bike-rich geography that just keeps improving.

Algorithmic-fu? A quick Google search ensued. It appears that -fu is a productive nominal suffix meaning something like "prowess." It is most heavily used by techies, hence such neologisms as metric-fu, emacs-fu, Script-fu, and gym-fu (a "fitness minigame" iPhone app).

There is also Google-fu (amusingly debated at this online forum), defined by a netizen as


     the uncanny ability to hit on the right combinations of
     words and phrases to make Google [hit on] a half-
     remembered webpage that you saw once back in 2002.


Without question, the suffix -fu is from kung fu, a Chinese phrase that when used by English speakers refers only to the martial art made famous by David Carradine in that 1970s TV show. But kung fu in Chinese (gongfu in Mandarin, gang hu in my native Teochew) may be used of anything that is performed with great skill and/or labour.

Indeed, the first sense listed for gongfu in my Concise Oxford Chinese-English Dictionary is "time." You gongfu zai lai ba means "Come again whenever you have time". It is only senses 2 and 3 that define gongfu as "effort;work; labour" and "workmanship; skill; art" respectively.

And it is the gong element that does the heavy lifting, so to speak—this is the element that means "work," "worker," or "man-day" (whence the sense of time develops). Our -fu, on the other hand, means "husband" or "man."

So to be perfectly correct, we should be using Google-fu to mean "master of Google." Instead, we see it used to mean something like "(mysterious) power," as in My Darknet style Google-fu is more powerful than your Wetware style Google-fu (whatever that means).

By the way, the posters on Google-fu were all agreed that the -fu suffix had been introduced into English by Joe Bob Briggs. I had never heard of him (I do not get out much), but I now know that he is a film critic and comedian who would sprinkle -fu phrases throughout his reviews of B-horror movies.