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fuck·up

(fŭk′ŭp′)

n. Vulgar Slang

1. One who acts carelessly or foolishly; a bungler.

2. A blunder; a bungle.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

fuck•up

(ˈfʌkˌʌp)

n. Slang (vulgar).

1. a person who bungles or botches, esp. a habitual bungler.

2. a bungle or botch.

[1955–60]

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun	1.	fuckup - someone who makes mistakes because of incompetence blunderer, botcher, bumbler, bungler, fumbler, sad sack, stumbler, butcher incompetent, incompetent person - someone who is not competent to take effective action
	2.	fuckup - an embarrassing mistake blooper, blunder, boner, boo-boo, botch, bungle, flub, foul-up, pratfall, bloomer error, fault, mistake - a wrong action attributable to bad judgment or ignorance or inattention; "he made a bad mistake"; "she was quick to point out my errors"; "I could understand his English in spite of his grammatical faults" bobble - the momentary juggling of a batted or thrown baseball; "the second baseman made a bobble but still had time to throw the runner out" snafu - an acronym often used by soldiers in World War II: situation normal all fucked up spectacle - a blunder that makes you look ridiculous; used in the phrase `make a spectacle of' yourself bull - a serious and ludicrous blunder; "he made a bad bull of the assignment" fumble, muff - (sports) dropping the ball fluff - a blunder (especially an actor's forgetting the lines) faux pas, gaffe, slip, solecism, gaucherie - a socially awkward or tactless act howler - a glaring blunder clanger - a conspicuous mistake whose effects seem to reverberate; "he dropped a clanger" misstep, trip-up, stumble, trip - an unintentional but embarrassing blunder; "he recited the whole poem without a single trip"; "he arranged his robes to avoid a trip-up later"; "confusion caused his unfortunate misstep"

Translations

cafouillage

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References in periodicals archive

Fuckup Nights, the Mexican-born event where high-profile entrepreneurs share with the community stories about their past failures, had its third round in AltCity on January 14; their mission is to create solidarity by sharing experiences of failure and lessons learned.

Talent takes the stage

Is it that same fuckup who learned from nothing?" he wrote.

Is there hope for the survivors of the drug wars? Criminalized and discarded, falling at the bottom of every statistic, they want something better

This is why you're a fuckup. Which isn't completely true.

The Art of Knotting and Splicing

The stare said it all, like where did I find this fuckup? And why hadn't he asked for Dad's autograph?

The Autograph

His secret is that he sees himself as one of the pillars of the firmament, yeah, man--he reads the world's doom in his own fuckup. If he is less great than God intended him to be, then America is in Trouble.

Norman Mailer today: this essay first appeared in commentary magazine in 1967

Branded on my forehead--F, for Fuckup."--A Fistful of Fig Newtons by Jean Shepherd

An entire alphabet of scarlet letters

There is no greater lesson than a massive fuckup. I have spent the majority of my 30s cleaning up the mess I made in my 20s.

House rules

At moments this produces a certain inadvertent, rather Nabokovian, humor; thus, when Bailey attempts to "talk the talk" and incorporate Yates's own self-description, he stumbles, as here: "The man seems to have taken pity on Yates, though his typical mood toward the forlorn fuckup was, apparently, exasperation." Come again?

The disaster parade

"I always give people one fuckup. This was your fuckup.

The computer programmer

"A fuckup, but she's got a good heart." Indeed, though Brenda's family hails from Dempsy's predominantly white working-class counterpart, Gannon, she finds contentment working with the mostly black children and parents of Dempsy's Henry T.

Freedomland

Before getting his butt kicked in a back alley by a mysterious stranger, Davis sings the song of a man condemned--if only in his miserable mind--to be hanged; we assume Davis must be a victim before we realize, over the next 100 minutes, he's a fuckup. Homeless and broke and constantly relying on the kindness of strangers or near strangers or the newly estranged, the suddenly solo singer was once half of a duo whose fortunes were on the rise.

Goodbye song: leave it to the Coen brothers to find folk music's end in the early 1960s

Each painting requires four screens to render its image, and though sometimes the resulting quadrants are correctly aligned, in two works there is a deliberate fuckup, a misaligmnent leaving a sliver of white at the center of the image, or a gap through which one sees an earlier, differently colored layer of printing.

Stain resistance