fiasco
A fiasco (from Italian fiasco , actually "bottle") is a failure or failure.
etymology
In Italian, Fiasco originally and still today refers to a large -bellied wine bottle . The word is related to the German word "bottle" ( old high German flazkâ ). The meaning “failure” has been traceable since the 18th century and comes from the technical jargon of the theater: fiasco was the name of actors and their critics a play that the audience did not like or a failed performance. With this special, theatrical meaning, the word was borrowed into German towards the beginning of the 19th century - probably through the mediation of French - and used by E. T. A. Hoffmann (1819) and Heinrich Heine (1837), initially often in the fixed, but today outdated phrase "make fiasco", which corresponds to the Italian far fiasco (" fail with the audience", literally "make a bottle"). The term soon spread beyond the theater and is now anchored in the common language , as a synonym for “failure, failure, collapse” or the terms “ debakel ” and “disaster”, which were also borrowed into German in the 19th century . As a foreign word , fiasco can be found today in many other languages, such as English and Russian.
The question of how to explain the expansion of the meaning from “bottle” to “failure” is controversial. Possibly the double meaning of the Italian word is based on the same idea as the derogatory use of "bottle" (or other hollow bodies) in the sense of "failure, idiot" in German. It is also conceivable that onomatopoeia played a role in this. For comparison , the synonymous and sonically not dissimilar word “ flop ” is a good choice, which onomatopoeically imitates the sound of a thud.
Hardly tenable is according to estimates by Anatoly Liberman often rumored theory that the term originates from the glassblowing craft descended, supposedly out of Murano ; if the attempt to create an ornate glass vessel failed, the result was only good enough to turn it into a bottle. Liberman also considers a connection with bottle-carrying , a medieval honor punishment , in which the condemned person was put on chains with bottles or bottle-shaped shame stones for public humiliation, is unlikely .
literature
- Fiasco . In: German Foreign Dictionary , 2nd Edition, Volume 5: Eau de Cologne - Futurism . De Gruyter, Berlin and New York 2004, pp. 813–814.
- Fiasco. In: Digital dictionary of the German language .
- Anatoly Liberman : Still in the Bottleneck, or, Chasing for the First Fiasco , article on his blog, The Oxford Etymologist , April 9, 2008.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ bottle. In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . tape 3 : E – research - (III). S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1862, Sp. 1725–1726 ( woerterbuchnetz.de ).