What does "things are all fouled up" means?

Question

The following is a dialogue in the movie CHARADE. What is the meaning of "things are all fouled up." Is this an old English? Thank you.

BARTHOLOMEW : Dry-cleaningwise, things are all fouled up. I had a good man - an excellent man on the Rue Ponthieu, but H.Q. asked us to use the plant here in the building -- to ease the gold outflow.

Answer 1

It means that things are not going well.

Answer 2

This would possibly be an example of "Early Modern English"; the English that was more commonly spoken in Shakespeare's time. Such a phrase as- "things are all fouled up" was still quite frequently used well into "Modern English" times as well. I did hear it in my youth more than a few times.

It's meaning is simply, that things are not going right at all.

Answer 3

Situation Normal All F***ed Up

It's not really fouled; it's the bad F word. It's from the Army, the letters spell SNAFU and it is a phrase people use that means things are going as usual, all messed up, because we are in the army and we hate it!!

"Well sir, we hit a little snafu, the jeep will be repaired in an hour"

Answer 4

It means the situation is a mess, nothing is working the way it should, etc. Other, similar, military-derived expressions are acronyms, SNAFU and TARFU, the former having made it into modern dictionaries as a noun. It means "Situation normal, all fouled up"; the second means "Things are really fouled up. (In military usage, the world "fouled" was originally "f...ked".)

Answer 5

hello
''when you hear a phrase like things are fouled up
this can also mean messed up.

some example sentences
the waitress got the order all fouled up
this means she got them messed up

the government has things all fouled up
they have things all messed up

Answer 6

Fouled up in this case means messed up.

Answer 7

everything's screwed up