FUBAR
SNAFU is an acronym which can have different (but similar) meanings depending on usage. It is believed to have originated in the US Army during World War II. There are a number of slang army acronyms that are similar to SNAFU. They include:
- SNAFU - "Situation normal: all fucked up".
- TARFU - "Things are really fucked up".
- FUBAR - "Fucked up beyond all recognition" or "Fucked up beyond all repair".
- JANFU - "Joint Army/Navy Fuckup" apparently used by British troops in WWII. This, combined with a radical increase in joint-forces operations since 1989, has led to the rare but increasing use of JAAFU, for "Joint Army-[[Air Force]] Fuck-Up."
- FUMTU - "Fucked Up More Than Usual"
- SUSFU - "Situation Unchanged, Still Fucked Up)
(in situations where 'fucked' is inappropriate, it is often replaced with 'fouled')
There is some folk etymology that links fubar to the metasyntactic variable, foobar. Snafu is also used in the Illuminatus trilogy and in the Private Snafu series of World War II cartoons.
Except in military and computer sciences/hacker communities, the word fubar had fallen out of use since the 1960s but has enjoyed another resurgence since it was used in the movie Saving Private Ryan (1998).
See also: Shit sandwich
Snafu is the name given to a mutant gene in the genome of Drosophila melanogaster. Flies afflicted with this gene will start out completely normal in phenotype, but then will start to develop intensely grotesque mutations as they grow up.
