Snafu

[AngelicaDeAlquezar]

A couple of days ago, the solution for Wordle was "snafu".
This is the first time I find this word ever, and its definition in dictionaries have made me wonder when and where would native speakers use it.
Can anyone give me examples of usage in sentences, please? :D

Would you say something like: "That party was a real snafu"? :thinking:

[Rusty]

I hardly use the word myself, but it is commonly used to describe any situation that is messed up, gone wrong/bad, fouled up, soured, gone awry, bungled, chaotic, etc., but is as expected. It can be used as a noun, adjective, or verb.

The word itself is an acronym, in case your dictionary didn't clue you in to that fact. It stands for 'situation normal, all fouled up' (the second-to-last word being a euphemism for the original word). I didn't hear it until the nineties, in the workforce, but the word was coined in the forties, according to my dictionary.

[poli]

The 1940's origin is correct. It is an expression coined by the members of the military during the war.

[AngelicaDeAlquezar]

@Rusty: Thanks! I found the definition quite funny. That explains why it doesn't look like a "well-behaved" English word. :D

@Poli: Thank you! I had no idea. :)

[wrholt]

A related term, also original coined by US military, is "fubar", which also is an acronym for "fouled up beyond all recognition".

"Fubar" (slightly respelled as "foobar") is also the source for a bit of jargon among computer programmers and computer scientists, which was coined by folks who created the first implementations of UNIX in the 1970s. The early manuals for the programming language "C" used "foo" and "bar" as the names of many example functions. Specifically, when the example code discusses only one function, it is named "foo", and when the example code discusses 2 functions where one function calls the other function, the function "foo" calls the function "bar".

In many of my computer sciences courses at university, most instructors regularly used "foo" and "bar" as arbitrary function names when presenting example code where the function names weren't relevant to whatever information they were trying to present to us.

[AngelicaDeAlquezar]

@Wrholt: I had never found "fubar" either.
Pretty interesting acronyms. :D
Having those two variables must have made programming more fun. ;)