piss-up in a brewery
- idiom
- /pɪs ʌp ɪn ə ˈbruːəri/
- NSFW
:
no podría organizar una fiesta de borrachos en una cervecería
- He couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery, which resulted in the party being a complete disaster.
Examples
-
After the event fell apart, everyone joked that they couldn't plan a piss-up in a brewery.
-
As a Libyan, I am sad to say that my compatriots cannot organize a piss-up in a brewery, to use an English colloquialism.
Blog text (34) -
The manager is so disorganized that he couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery if his job depended on it.
Synonyms
To be unable to manage even a very simple task because you are very bad at doing things
Not able to do simple tasks, often confused and disorganized
A rude way to say someone is very bad at simple tasks and easily confused
Antonyms
How Competent
Surface Forms
Morphology
Although the literal parts yield 'a drinking party in a brewery', the intended meaning ('so bad at organising that one cannot even arrange an obvious drinking event') is an ironic cultural idiom relying on slang ('piss‑up') and pragmatic inference. This evaluative, hyperbolic usage and the irony are not predictably derivable from the constituents by a B1 learner, so the expression is opaque.
Etymology
Piss-up in a brewery comes from a simple picture: a piss-up is a loud drinking party and a brewery is a place already full of beer, so putting a party there should be very easy. Saying someone 'couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery' means they are very bad at organising things — in other words, 'incompetent' or 'disorganized'.