The word has been used in newsgroup and hacker culture to indicate irony, humor, or Surrealism. Placement at the end of a statement in brackets ("fnord") explicitly tags the intent, and may be so applied to any random or surreal sentence, coercive subtext, or anything jarringly out of context, intentional or not. It is sometimes used as a metasyntactic variable in programming. Fnord appears in the Church of the SubGenius recruitment film "Arise!" and has been used in the SubGenius newsgroup alt.slack.