botch up en · VERB
Meanings
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(informal, transitive) To ruin, mess up.
What the school books say about the united efforts of the two great Rossums is all a fairy tale. They used to have dreadful rows. The old atheist hadn't the slightest conception of industrial matters, and the end of it was that young Rossum shut him up in some laboratory or other and let him fritter the time away with his monstrosities, while he himself started on the business from an engineer's point of view. Old Rossum cursed him and before he died he managed to botch up two physiological horrors. Then one day they found him dead in the laboratory. And that's his whole story.
c. 1921 (date written), Karel Čapek, translated by Paul Selver, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama […], Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 1923, →OCLC, Act 1:Where was I? [...] I meant to begin this narrative with Dermot Hoggins. That’s the problem with inking one’s memoirs in longhand. You can’t go changing what you’ve already set down, not without botching things up even more.
2004, David Mitchell, “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish”, in Cloud Atlas, →ISBN, page 146:
Forms
| Spelling | Features | Labels | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| botching up | Tense=Pres, VerbForm=Part | lexicographic | |
| botched up | Tense=Past, VerbForm=Part | lexicographic | |
| botched up | Tense=Past | lexicographic | |
| botches up | Number=Sing, Person=3, Tense=Pres | lexicographic |
Translations (10)
fi toheloida (ruin, mess up) · de verpfuschen (ruin, mess up) · fr bousiller (ruin, mess up) · fi sössiä (ruin, mess up) · de verderben (ruin, mess up) · ru испо́ртить (ruin, mess up) · fr gâter (ruin, mess up) · fi tunaroida (ruin, mess up) · ru попо́ртить (ruin, mess up) · ru по́ртить (ruin, mess up)