BALLS-UP
[Q] From Graham C Reed, South Africa: “I’ve been wondering where the expression balls-up comes from.”
[A] Though now widely known in the English-speaking world, this is in origin a British coarse slang term for a bungled or badly carried out task or action, a messed-up or confused situation, or a complete foul-up. The earliest example I’ve found is from Frederic Manning’s book about the First World War, The Middle Parts of Fortune, published in 1929; a Tommy on the Somme in 1916 is quoted as saying: “I suppose we’ll come through all right; we’ve done it before, so we can do it again. Anyway, it can’t be more of a bloody balls-up than some o’ the other shows ‘ave been.” [Show here is slang for a military engagement, battle or raid.]
The obvious implication is that there is a testicular association, which is why it is regarded as coarse or low slang, though quite how it might have come about is unclear. As soon as one begins to look into matters more deeply, that origin becomes more unlikely still. My first clue was this in the Lincoln Daily News of Nebraska dated October 1902: “He balls up the English language and his verses are without rhythm or sense.”
This verbal construction, to ball up — in much the same sense as in the British slang term, though not regarded as coarse — turns out to have a long history in the US. Jonathan Lighter has recorded examples in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang from the middle of the nineteenth century. A book about college slang dated 1865 records that to ball up meant to fail a recitation or examination. From no later than the 1880s it meant becoming mixed up or confused or entangled in some way. There’s a reference to the noun ball-up in the US publication Dialect Notes in 1900, meaning a confused or muddled situation. It looks highly plausible that balls-up, although a British expression, derives from this older American one.
Having said all that, there’s no obvious clue from the examples where it might come from. Indeed Professor Lighter remarks at the beginning of the entry that the term’s “semantic development is obscure”, which is academic-speak for “I haven’t a clue, either”. Entanglement might suggest the ball is of string or yarn that has become snarled up, or perhaps it refers to crumpling a piece of paper into a ball, or conceivably it comes from college sports.
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