Snafu (original) (raw)

There are a number of slang army acronyms that are similar to 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).

SNAFU is also the name of an operating system written in pure x86-assembly. SNAFU's sourcecode is Public Domain and it's written by the pesudonym "smaffy" (SMall Aids For Funny Yells). The URL to the SNAFU operating system project page is " class="external">http://home.swipnet.se/smaffy/snafu/

Snafu is the name given to a mutant gene in the genome of Drosophila melanogaster. Flies afflicted with this gene will start out completely normal in phenotype, but then will start to develop intensely grotesque mutations as they grow up.