dog's breakfast

plural dog's breakfasts

1. CommonwealthIrelandUKidiomaticAn unappealing mixture; a disorderly situation; a mess.

   Critics here are reserving judgement on whether ABC will do "Life in Mars" justice or make a dog's breakfast of it.

   2008 May 18, David Usborne, “The Gene Genie gets an LA makeover”, in The Independent, retrieved 09 Jun 2008

   3 more examples

   So complex was the scheme that neither blacks nor whites could say for certain who had won. "A dog's breakfast," cried Laborite M.P. James Callaghan. "I say frankly that I do not begin to understand it."

   1961 July 7, “Black Temper”, in Time, archived from the original on 03 Feb 2012

   I'd trade one of their sublime sentences for the entire crop of sprawling, show-offy novels – dog′s breakfasts of facetiousness – that are currently the literary vogue.

   2010, Kate Jennings, “Bouleversé”, in Trouble: Evolution of a Radical/Selected Writings 1970–2010, page 277

   The highest-grossing movie in America last year culminated in a dog’s breakfast of warmed-over, second-wave feminist sloganeering that would have sounded tired coming from the mouth of Gloria Steinem in 1968.

   2024 June 18, Spencer Klavan, “A Matter of Taste”, in The American Mind

   Synonyms: cat's breakfast, pig's breakfast, hodgepodge, pig's ear, dog's dinner, bedlam, car crash, chaos

2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see dog, breakfast.

   And the next morning she got up to fix breakfast: the old lady had told her, she had to fix her breakfast, the old lady's breakfast, the cat's breakfast, the dog's breakfast, and the bull's breakfast.

   (Can we date this quote?), Alfred Anderson, “59. The Lazy Sisters and the Smart Sister”, in Swapping Stories: Folktales from Louisiana, University Press of Mississippi, page 133