Fiasco

This is a fun word to try to put into an everyday conversation. "That party was a complete fiasco!" I think it is just fun to say. Fiasco means, according to the AHD, "a complete failure." That's probably the real reason it is fun to say this word: how often do things just completely fail?

Like most of my blogs, the best part of the word is not the actual word, but the etymologies behind them. The AHD says that the word comes from the French. This was taken by the Italian phrase fare fiasco, which means "to make a bottle, fail." This comes from just fiasco, or bottle. The AHD gives the story as such: this word is probably a translation of the French word bouteille, which means "bottle, error." It was used by the French to insult the 18th century Italian actors when they committed a linguistic error on the stage in France. Fiasco, in turn, came from the Late Latin flasco. This word, however, is from a Germanic origin.

I think it is interesting that it started in a Germanic origin, went to through Latin, and we took it back into our originally Germanic-based language. Hrm. Maybe the word itself is not a fiasco at all!