Etymologists try to discover the origins of just about every word they come across. Sometimes, though, their efforts come to nothing but a fiasco. In fact you could say that’s about happened in trying to figure out the origin of “fiasco.”
“Fiasco” comes from Italian, where it has a perfectly straightforward meaning: a bottle or flask. In the 1700s there was an idiomatic use among Italian theater troupes: “far fiasco”. The literal meaning is “to make a bottle,” but what they meant by it was “a bad performance.”
An 1824 issue of the magazine Harmonicon brought this idea to English readers: “In the letters which he [Rossini] wrote to his mother at Bologna, he was accustomed to draw a smaller or larger figure of a flask, (fiasco) at the side of the account of any new opera he had brought out, to indicate the degree of failure which his work had met with. The reader should be apprised that fare fiasco is the Italian cant phrase for a failure.”
The first act in the “fiasco” fiasco is set in Italy. How a phrase for making a bottle came to mean a bad performance is, to say the least, unclear. The most common story about it goes like this, as recounted in the London News in 1883: “…there was once at Florence a celebrated harlequin by the name of Biancolelli, whose forte was the improvisation of comic harangues on any object which he might chance to hold in his hand. One evening he appeared on the stage with a flask (“fiasco”) in his hand. But, as ill-luck would have it, he failed in extracting any “funniments” out of the bottle. At last, exasperated, he thus apostrophised the flask: “It is thy fault that I am so stupid to-night. Fuori! Get out of this!” So saying, he threw the flask behind him, and shattered it into atoms. Since then, whenever an actor or singer failed to please an audience, they used to say that it was like Biancolelli’s ‘fiasco.’”
(As an aside, “apostrophizing” means claiming someone or something has ownership — if you say “this belongs to John”, you’re “apostrophizing.” It’s the same as saying “this is John’s,” which has an apostrophe.)
It doesn’t seem like anyone was particularly convinced by that story of “far fiasco”, because there are some others too. Chianti wine comes in bottles that have basketwork at the bottom — that’s because the bottom of the bottle is round and it won’t stand up without the basket. There’s a story about “far fiasco” coming from putting together a performance so poorly it’s like trying to stand up a chianti bottle without its basket. Nobody believes this one either.
Act 2 moves to France. There’s another theory that “fiasco” entered English not directly from Italian but via French. This rather ignores the fact that the first appearance of “fiasco” in English specifically mentions that it’s “the Italian cant phrase for a failure,” but never mind that. Here’s the story: long ago there was a French idiomatic phrase “faire une bouteille” which was used to mean “make a mistake”. But its literal meaning is, like “far fiasco,” “to make a bottle.” Supposedly the French phrase was adopted into Italian, where it became “far fiasco,” and then around the 1820s “far fiasco” itself was adopted back into French. By then, of course, “faire une bouteille” was long forgotten. The problem with this idea is that it doesn’t leave any time for “far fiasco” to move from French to English, because it appeared in English as in the early 1820s, the same time it appeared in French.
And that, in a nutshell (or a bottle), is the etymological fiasco of “fiasco”. Anybody trying to dramatize these desperate attempts at explanations would definitely end up drawing a big fiasco next to their report.
