Snafu

There are a number of slang army acronyms that are like 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".

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: cluster fuck