debacle
The noun debacle describes a situation that represents a severe defeat or has had a disastrous outcome. In the German language, the word has been in use since the 19th century.
etymology
The German word is borrowed from the French word débâcle , which actually stands for ice drift or "sudden dissolution". When it was borrowed, the grammatical gender of the word changed: in French it is a feminine, in German it is a neuter.
The French débâcle is a derivation of the French verb débâcler (for "break up"), which belongs to the French bâcler (for "verrammeln" or "obstruct"). The Latin noun baculum for “rod” or “bolt”, which was adopted by the Roman legions into Gallic and from there later into French, became the verb bâcler (for “pushing a bolt”) in the 13th century . The opposite has been described with the prefix de- since the 15th century : débâcler would thus be the “opening of a bolt”. In Johann Christian August Heyse Fremdwörterbuch of 1865 was debacliren understood "unlock": "the unloaded ships from a port to bring."
The word “debacle” spread internationally, especially after the publication of Émile Zola's novel La Débâcle (1892), which deals with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b debacle. In: Friedrich Kluge : Etymological dictionary of the German language. edited by Elmar Seebold. 23rd, expanded edition. Berlin / New York 1995, p. 165.
- ↑ Anders Kluge: He suspects that débâcler originally meant "to block with a beam or rod".
- ↑ Johann Christian August Heyse: General Germanic and explanatory foreign dictionary with designation of the pronunciation and emphasis of the words together with precise details of their origin and education. 13th edition. Hahn, Hanover 1865, p. 233.
- ↑ Hans Schulz, Otto Basler, Gerhard Strauss (eds.): Da capo - Dynastie (= German foreign dictionary . Volume 4 ). 2nd Edition. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-11-016235-0 , p. 51 ( limited preview in Google Book search).