SNAFU

And I’m now tackling the acronyms.

SNAFU is one of those marvellous words that sounds exactly like what it means. It lands with a thud, like a box dropped in the wrong place, or a muttered curse from someone knee deep in disaster.

It came out of 1940’s American military slang and stands for ‘Situation Normal, All Fouled Up.’ Originally the F stood for a stronger profane version, which was far less polite and far more accurate. It’s all about chaotic, disordered situations, where everything has gone wrong. There’s been a major mistake, an error, confusion, mess, an unexpected complication. Nothing is where it should be and the people in charge are pretending this is all perfectly manageable.

Plain and simple chronic dysfunction. You’re stuck in a situation where nothing is going to plan. A technical glitch, a disastrous mishap, a logistical nightmare. You’ve run into an error or a problem that is large.

That really is the genius of it. ‘Situation normal.’ Nothing to see here. Just the usual catastrophe. Just the regular confusion, delay, wrong turn, missing part, broken plan and ill-timed disaster. ‘All fouled up’, as expected.

It’s a good grumbling army word. Snafu is when the supply ship arrives, but the stuff packed on the bottom are the things everyone urgently needed on top. It’s when the radio receiver sets make it all the way to the jungle camp, only for someone to realise no one sent batteries.

It’s paperwork filed in the wrong place, instructions sent to the wrong person and a plan so poorly executed it becomes almost impressive. Not clever enough to be sabotage, just hopeless enough to be human.

A snafu is not a tiny hiccup. It’s bigger than forgetting your sunglasses, but smaller than total societal collapse. It sits somewhere in the middle – irritating, inconvenient, sometimes absurd. It stops you from accomplishing the thing you meant to do. We wanted to get the campsite up before sundown, but due to several snafus along the way, including a run-in with an angry bear, we didn’t set up camp until midnight. It’s not bad luck. That is a snafu.

In the military, a snafu could be dangerous, even deadly. These days the words have wandered off into everyday life, where it now applies to all sorts of bungles and blunders. Driving all the way to the basketball stadium before realising you left your tickets on the kitchen bench, that’s a major snafu.

Managing to lock your keys in the car while the car is still running, that’s an elite-level snafu.

It is such a useful word because life is full of these ridiculous little breakdowns – moments when the wheels come off, but only just enough to be deeply annoying and later, can be very funny.