snafu

Related to snafu: TTYL

snafu

slang A situation or event that has become totally ruined or ridiculously confused or chaotic. Originally a military acronym for "situation normal, all fouled/fucked up." Sometimes spelled with capital letters. Primarily heard in US. I spent the whole weekend sorting out a huge snafu with our automated ticketing system. Apparently it sent out thousands of tickets to the wrong people all around the country. The federal government is suing the state government, which was already suing the federal government for trying to sue the state government. What a SNAFU!
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

snafu

(snæˈfu)
n. an accident; a foul-up. (Acronym. From situation normal, all fouled (fucked) up. Also capitalized.) What a snafu! All the power went off when you turned on the coffeepot.
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions
See also:
  • reality of the situation
  • if I was/were in your place
  • if I were in your place
  • get down to the facts
  • take (something) by the throat
  • come into play
  • do the business
  • be (not) out of the woods
  • if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen
  • put a good face on (something)
References in periodicals archive
SNAFU is worried that San Francisco is "already immersed in a sea of electromagnetic radiation" from, among other sources, some 2,500 licensed cell phone antennas at 530 locations around the city.
Lost & Found x All Night Passion : TheValentine's Rebellion at Snafu - Saturday 15th / PS5
Beattie experimented unsuccessfully with a couple of different comic ideas before hitting on the "Snafu" gag panel.
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms swears it's not some sort of back-door maneuver aimed at shutting down gun sellers, but a bureaucratic snafu the agency is scrambling to make right.
snafu, as foreign governments are amazed that Israel cannot handle the blaze.
Republican (http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2011/06/huntsman-campaign-launch-begins-day-with-misspelling-of-his-own-name.html) Jon Huntsman kicked off his presidential campaign today with a tiny snafu. His name was spelled wrong on the passes he was handing out to the press.
Her campaign confirmed later Sunday evening she was not hurt in the stage snafu. It was not immediately known what caused the incident.
Snafu were fantastic at keeping the underground scene alive.
Ftigh For Now ed polished ht live, their es making nsfer from Y–nominated f The North Of Snafu, Aberdeen 25.10 Miaoux Miaoux returned to Aberdeen for the first time with a full band – and the difference was phenomenal.
While Trump basks in the 'glory' of being the US President to solve this issue, the world condemns a US snafu.
file flap, in which a White House aide procured dossiers on as many as 340 people, including many prominent Republicans, as a "snafu." Though Clinton meant simply a dumb bungle, someone of Bob Dole's generation would remember "snafu" as a pungent World War II acronym for a phrase beginning "Situation Normal."
Programs affected by the snafu include Black Harbor and Cold Squad, as well as other shows in development for next season.
With some 1,200 guests mobbing the museum courtyard, chair Tom Luzier and company managed to keep everybody moving, entertained and fed without a single long line or snafu. Of course, it always takes an hour or two to traverse the first few yards of courtyard, paying and accepting compliments, cheek-kissing and posing for the paparazzi.
In the kind of bureaucratic snafu he delighted in exposing, a red-faced Chicago Park District is admitting that trees planted as a tribute to the deceased columnist, in a spot known as Royko's Grove along Lake Michigan, will have to be moved after only two years because no one realized they were in the way of a long- planned $300-million shoreline-protection project.
But even before that, morale--and the network's credibility--had been hammered by the June 1999 "Tailwind" investigative snafu and the imperious three-year reign of Rick Kaplan as CNN/USA president (he was let go last summer).