FUBAR, SUSFU, and 17 Other Glorious “Military Screw-Up Acronyms”
“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 acronyms of the SNAFU and FUBAR school of catastrophe” so I can give them their well-earned day in the sun here. There’s a rich history of slang terminology developed during military conflicts and becoming part of civilian lingo, but, as Dickson points out, World War II was “the first war to see the large-scale introduction of initialisms and acronyms.” In fact, the word “acronym” doesn’t get used at all in English until the 1940s, when everybody suddenly decided they liked making words out of initials.
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