to make a soup sandwich
- idiom
- Informal
:
hacer un desastre
- They compared planning the festival to making a soup sandwich because of all the unexpected problems.
Examples
-
Don't make a soup sandwich out of this project!
-
Trying to manage that team was like making a soup sandwich.
-
His attempt to fix the old computer ended up making a soup sandwich.
-
I always make a soup sandwich when I try to multitask.
-
His attempt to fix the old computer ended up making a soup sandwich.
-
They compared planning the festival to making a soup sandwich because of all the unexpected problems.
-
Trying to manage that team was like making a soup sandwich.
Synonyms
1
2.1
Make a place messy so things are not in order
Antonyms
How Messy
- Informal
- Informal
597
2.8
63
6.0
1
2.1
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase creates a vivid image—trying to make a sandwich out of soup—which signals an incompatible, messy result, so a learner who knows 'make', 'soup' and 'sandwich' can plausibly infer it means producing a disorganized or disastrous outcome. However, this is a metaphorical, non‑standard idiomatic image rather than a regular compositional pattern, so the exact pragmatic sense and its usage are not fully predictable without prior exposure.
Etymology
The idiom make a soup sandwich paints a clear, funny picture: trying to put soup between slices of bread for a sandwich would make everything soggy and fall apart. So, it means 'to try something that ends up very messy or fails'.