A: When can we wrap up today?

B: I’m not sure. The accounting department made a complete hash of these numbers. We’ll need to tally the entire ledger again.

Note: This idiom means “to ruin, bungle, or spoil something.” A similar saying is “to make a mess of something.” “Hash” comes from the French verb “hacher,” meaning “to chop up small.” It often had culinary use. A hash is a chopped up mixture of things, most notably the dish hash browns, made of shredded potatoes. It can also be a dish of cooked meat cut into small pieces and recooked with gravy. From this comes the derogatory sense of hash meaning “a jumble of incongruous elements, a mess.”