FUD

I've never seen it in the US or Canada, but in Mexico FUD is a brand of processed meat and cheese products. I always thought it was a funny name because it looks like it's trying to say "food" with a funny accent, but now I think it's even funnier because indeed, the processed food substitutes always produced in me quite a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

FUD /fuhd/ n.

Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products." The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software. See IBM. After 1990 the term FUD was associated increasingly frequently with Microsoft, and has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

A FUD is also a "female urination device": this is a thing that allows people who don't have a penis to urinate standing up, without having to pull down their pants and underwear. They are mostly marketed to hikers, backpackers, and rock climbers - in general, people who are likely to find themselves in a position where taking off layers of clothing to pee is embarrassing, inconvenient, or impossible.

In form, a FUD is a plastic funnel designed to fit between the labia over the urethral opening. It can take a bit of practice to get it to seal against the skin and not leak, so practicing at home where cleanup (and possibly a change of clothes) is easy is recommended before trying it on a trail. Also, a number of women (myself included) find that the hardest part of getting used to using one is overcoming several decades of training to always sit or squat before urinating.

Several companies make FUDs: the brands I know of off the top of my head are PStyle, SheWee, and Pibella. They vary somewhat in size and shape, so one or another will be easier and more comfortable depending on individual differences in anatomy. My hiking partner uses a PStyle and I have a Pibella - the Pibella is a much smaller profile (one reviewer describes it as being rather like peeing through a straw), but I find it's correspondingly easy to use around several winter layers.

I decided I should look into a FUD a couple years ago while hiking Sand Canyon in Colorado: being desert, there weren't any convenient thickets of trees to duck into, and I eventually had to resort to stepping off into a dry watercourse and hoping no one came in sight. It's proved its worth on an early-winter expedition to the Adirondacks a few days ago; it's much nicer than having to be half-naked in below-freezing weather.

Fud (?), n. [Of uncertain origin.]

1.

The tail of a hare, coney, etc.

Burns.

2.

Woolen waste, for mixing with mungo and shoddy.

© Webster 1913.