What does FUBAR mean from Saving Private Ryan?

What are you reading this for? You know my question!

I do believe it means “fcked up beyond all recognition". Variation: "fcked up beyond all repair”.

Thankyou for clearing that up for me!

As Allan Sherman noted in his book “The Rape of the APE*”, as part of the toughening-up process, during WWII even Army situation reports were obscene. Thus we have:
SNAFU: Situation Normal All Fucked Up

JANFU: Joint Army-Navy Fuck Up

and

FUBAR: Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition

He goes on to note that “Back home, the papers changed it to FOULED up.” That’s how my virgin eyes and ears first encountered it. It was YEARS before I learned the truth.

Aren’t you happy you now now?

SNAFU and FUBAR- I always learned the gentler versions first…“fouled” indeed!!!

And (lest we forget):

BOHICA: “Bend over. Here it comes again!”

FIGMO: “F*ck it. Got my orders.”

I heard this story somewhere:

A general was being interviewed by a tv reporter and used the acronym SOL. The reporter asked what it meant. Of course the general couldn’t say the actual meaning on tv, so he claimed it meant “soldier out of luck”.

In Vietnam FUGAZI was an acronym for “Fucked Up, Got Ambushed, Zipped In”. I found this one in an interview with Ian MacKaye (Frontman of Minor Threat and Fugazi). The interviewer asked him what the name of the band meant, and he related an anecdote about being at a concert and talking to a boy and a girl. The boy asked what the name of the band meant, and before Ian could answer, the girl responded with the acronym. Oddly enough, Ian had never heard of this in his life. Come to think of it, neither had I.

That’s really interesting, about Ian’s second Great Band. I had heard something similar, that Fugazi took its name from a line in a war picture but had assumed that it was Vietnamese and never bothered to find out what it meant. Thanks for the tip, argyle.

When I was in the 4th grade, we were studying acronyms. My teacher asked for some examples, and after a brief silence, I blurted out, “SNAFU!”. He went ashen, and took a few seconds to compose himself. He cleared his throat, and asked if anybody had any more. After another couple of seconds, I blurted out again, “FUBAR!” He kind of got jittery, and asked if anybody ELSE knew of any acronyms…

FUFI – Fucked up. Fixed it.
Circle Jerk – A situation which is far from optimal.
As in, “Chief, square away this circle jerk.”

The kindler, gentler Navy still uses “big boy” words.

I’m also partal to FULASS – Fucked up like a soup sandwich.

Charlie-Foxtrot = CF = cluster fuck (syn. FUBAR)
(For a visial, think of this: about a dozen people in a cluster, appendages flailing about everywhere.)

IIRC, the meaning of FUBAR was a question on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”. They of course said “fouled up”.

I work as a proofreader for manuals on how to deal with government regulations … one of our marketing letters recently came to me (before going out) saying that only our manual can help you “avoid the snafus” of some such regulation. Amazingly enough, even AFTER I pointed out what it meant, they let it go through, claiming that snafu is now enough of a part of the language that all vulgarity from the original meaning is meaningless; people (the marketing manager claim) see it only as a word meaning “mess,” not the acronym it originally was.

This thread makes me think of one of my favorite acronyms. I used to be one of 2 guys that ran a network for a daily newspaper, and we were constantly being called. 99.9% of the time the only thing wrong was what he called a PEBCAK - Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. :stuck_out_tongue:

F.O., S.O., & T.C. = f**k off, suck out, and take cover

WETSU = we eat this shit up

LAGNAF = let’s all get naked and ****

WGAS = who gives a shit

SH (sierra hotel) = shit hot

FTN = f**k the Navy (or Army, or CG, or MC, or AF)

NFG - no f**king good (also non-functioning gear)

EMS = eat my shorts

And then there was an entire series of shorthand we used to use called “the falcon codes”. The only one that has stayed with me is Falcon269: “Excuse me, sir, but I believe you have me confused with someone who gives a shit.”

GF = goat f***
…or for younger ears, goat farm or goat festival

SNAFU? FUBAR? BFD!

Sorry Mike, but on these boards you’ll learn that GF= goat felcher, not f**ker.

Also from the computer world, is RTFM (Read the manual). It also has somewhat less insulting cousins RTFS and RTFB (source and binary, respactively, for those applications distributed without documentation or even source code). I think folks are starting to forget the original meanings of these, too… I once worked for a professor, who perfectly politely told me that we would be using a particular software package, and that I ought to RTFM on certain programs.