SNAFU
military acronym
SNAFU is an acronym that is widely used to stand for the sarcastic expression "Situation normal: all fucked up". It is an example of military acronym slang. The phrase "all fucked up" is sometimes replaced with "all fouled up" or similar. It means that the situation is bad, but that this is a normal state of affairs. The acronym is believed to have originated in the United States Marine Corps during World War II, particularly as the nickname of USMC Corporal Merriell Shelton.
In modern usage, SNAFU is used to describe running into an error or problem that is large and unexpected. For example, in 2005, The New York Times published an article titled "Hospital Staff Cutback Blamed for Test Result Snafu". SNAFU also sometimes refers to a bad situation, mistake, or cause of trouble, and it is sometimes used as an interjection.
Origin
Most reference works, including the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, supply an origin date of 1940–1944, generally attributing it to the U.S. Army. Rick Atkinson ascribes the origin of SNAFU, FUBAR, and many other terms to cynical GIs ridiculing the army's penchant for acronyms.
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This entry incorporates text from “SNAFU” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.