What does “deu ruim” mean in Portuguese?

Deu ruim is the everyday Brazilian way to say “it went wrong” or “now we’re in trouble.” The trick is that ruim (“bad”) is an adjective doing an adverb’s job, and dar has no subject — nothing went bad, it just went bad. So you never adjust the ending: deu ruim stays put whether one thing or a hundred things fell apart.

Swap the tense and you cover the whole arc of a disaster: vai dar ruim (“this is going to go bad”), deu ruim (“it went bad”), and the warning vai dar muito ruim (“this is going to go really bad”). The clip runs through all of them as a prank backfires — the countdown, the panic, then the resigned deu ruim. Its opposite, deu bom, exists too but is far rarer; Brazilians are much quicker to announce when things have gone sideways.