FUBAR, SUSFU, and 17 Other Glorious “Military Screw-Up Acronyms”

When the snafu goes fubar and suddenly you have a tuifu on your hands …

A February 1944 issue of Newsweek magazine has a brief gloss on “The State of the Language” that poses more questions than it gives answers:

Recent additions to the ever-changing lexicon of the armed services:

Fubar: Fouled up beyond all recognition.

Janfu: Joint army-navy foul-up.

Jaafu: Joint Anglo-American foul-up.

“Fubar” is familiar to us alongside “snafu” (Situation Normal: All Fucked Up), and both have had enough linguistic success to achieve the rare Pinnochio-becoming-a-real-boy status of shedding the vulgar majuscules and periods that cling to most acronyms and remind us all of where they came from. But as the Newsweek gloss suggests, these colorful slang words are just the most illustrious members of a large family of terms that did hard work in the trenches cataloguing every conceivable bureaucratic military foul-up without any of the recognition.

With a good deal of help from Paul Dickson’s marvelously comprehensive War Slang: American Fighting Words & Phrases Since the Civil War, I’ve tracked down a few more of what Dickson calls the “military screw-up…