Looks like it's been changed back! What was the "bland" title in the middle?

"Google Ngram Viewer n-grams are wrong".

Ouch. Glad they reverted.

Dec 7, 1941: “200,000 tons of steel relocated to sea floor”

I, uhhhh.....I would like to know what TFA is meant to stand for, because I assume it is not "the ſucking article", but that was my first thought. Maybe "featured"? Google is only giving me "Teach For America" or "Trade Facilitation Agreement".

This is the kind of question that doesnt need to be answered with certainty. "The fucking article" is definitely the most fun interpretation of "TFA".

"The (Fine|Fucking) Article".

As others have noted, derived from RTFA (read TFA), which comes from RTFM (read the fine manual).

I don't know if RTFA/TFA originated at Slashdot, but both were certainly heavily used there, as noted in ... this fine Wikipedia article:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot>

If TFA is derived from RTFA (itself I assume derived from RTFM), then "the fucking article" seems the most correct, official, and proper.

I feel that the presence of this term here means that HN is the successor to the venerable Slashdot. Kind of comforting that there’s a straight line from the site that I spent so much time on 20 years ago, to this one.

Does "fornicating" sound more polite to you?

It does - but note that I made no mention of disapproving of impoliteness!

it is the fucking article. or "featured" if you're feeling classy.

I like to read it as The Fine Article.

Do we ever find out who came up with this line originally? I'd like to be able to quote it (with attribution) in the future.

It sounds like an old timey quote, but a cursory Google search turns up nothing. I can't even see who wrote the article!

lol, that's pretty good, I agree with you.