soup sandwich
- noun
- Slang
:
desastre total
- This project has turned into a complete soup sandwich!
Examples
-
Without proper instructions, their group project was a total soup sandwich from day one.
-
Trying to relocate the office during the busiest season turned into a real soup sandwich.
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After the new manager started, the whole department quickly became a soup sandwich.
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After the meeting, the plans were just a soup sandwich.
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After the new manager started, the whole department quickly became a soup sandwich.
-
Trying to relocate the office during the busiest season turned into a real soup sandwich.
-
Without proper instructions, their group project was a total soup sandwich from day one.
Synonyms
1
9.5
A situation or job that is very messy and done badly
1
8.3
A situation, job, or piece of work that is messy and badly done
A very messy, confused mix of things in one place
A very bad situation you must deal with
Antonyms
How Messy
Surface Forms
Morphology
soup + sandwich
The literal image of soup dumped into a sandwich creates an obvious sense of incongruity and mess, so a learner who knows 'soup' and 'sandwich' can likely infer a notion of disorder or something ruined. However, the precise idiomatic sense of a 'complete disaster' and the colloquial usage are metaphorical and culturally specific rather than strictly compositional, so the meaning is only partly predictable.
Etymology
Soup sandwich comes from the image of putting hot soup between slices of sandwich bread, which would get soggy and fall apart into a big mess. So people use it to describe something that is a 'mess' or a 'complete disaster'.