Word suggestion: titsup

[TRex]

It is an anagram from the military pronounced as a word: total inability to support usual performance.

[mkenuk]

It's a very common expression, usually with 'go/going/gone', comparable to 'it's gone pear-shaped' or 'go belly-up'.

I can't remember ever seeing it in writing; I suppose I'd always assumed it would be written as two words - "Be careful it doesn't go tits up!"
The expression 'make a cock-up of something' is probably British, as is 'make a balls-up'; both of these colourful phrases are, I think, hyphenated.

[TRex]

I can't remember ever seeing it in writing;

Here is one publication which uses it rather frequently, although always in caps.

[Calilasseia]

I can't remember ever seeing it in writing;

Here is one publication which uses it rather frequently, although always in caps.

And it's refreshing to see that someone else knows of The Register !!!!

[Alan W]

Wiktionary is the only dictionary I found that lists titsup as a single word, describing it as merely an alternative spelling of the two word version tits up.

There's quite an extensive discussion of the origin of tits up here. The acronym as ultimate origin seems dubious. My guess would be that the two-word expression came first, possibly derived simply from the idea of a dead body being flat on its back: "belly up", "toes turned up", etc. Later on, a backronym was coined, and subsequently the expression was sometimes written as a single word, to match the supposed acronymic origin.

The News on the Web corpus has 59 examples of the single word spelling, some in lower case and some in all capitals, but 58 of them are from the Register, the same website that TRex linked to. The only example not from the Register was from a reader's comment on a UK football fans' website. The iWeb corpus has 32 occurrences of titsup, 24 of them from the Register. The other 8 are almost all from readers' comments on sites covering either computing or football.

I'm not convinced we should allow titsup. It seems to be an eccentric way of writing the colloquial expression tits up, used mainly in one publication.

[TRex]

And it's refreshing to see that someone else knows of The Register !!!!

I read it most every day. It is a primary source for tech news (my profession).

I'm not convinced we should allow titsup. It seems to be an eccentric way of writing the colloquial expression tits up, used mainly in one publication.

Thanks for the always careful consideration, Alan.