balls up

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See also: balls-up

English

Etymology 1

From ball up.

Verb

balls up

  1. third-person singular simple present indicative of ball up

Etymology 2

From balls + up; see also balls-up.

Verb

balls up (third-person singular simple present ballses up, present participle ballsing up, simple past and past participle ballsed up)

  1. (Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, vulgar, intransitive) To make a mess of a situtation.
    • 2009, Jan Kjaerstad, The Discoverer, →ISBN:
      He was putting everything he had into it, but he kept ballsing up.
    • 2011, Lesley Thomson, A Kind of Vanishing, →ISBN:
      'We just have to get through without ballsing up
  2. (Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, vulgar, transitive) To do something badly. To ruin a job.
    He really ballsed up that paint work. It'll have to be redone!
    • 1977, Mungo MacCallum, Mungo's Canberra, page 142:
      It has got to the ludicrous stage that whenever Snedden makes a speech without actually ballsing something up irrevocably, they tell him he's the greatest thing since Winston Churchill;
    • 2010, A.L. Kennedy, Everything You Need, →ISBN:
      Bearing in mind that if you're teasing but you have to explain it, then you're not teasing, you're just ballsing things up and being a fucking thug.
    • 2023 January 28, Justin Myers, “62 dating green flags that shout ‘this one’s a keeper’”, in The Guardian:
      We’re humans, we’re fallible, there is no medal for being right all the time; admitting we ballsed it up is not a weakness, it’s a superpower.