botch up

Verb

botch up (third-person singular simple present botches up, present participle botching up, simple past and past participle botched up)

1. (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...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...
   • 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