Alleged incidents in Italian theatrical history
FIASCO, n. I have to write a newsletter about this word so I can stop repeatedly looking it up. It’s not that I don’t know what it means in English (a failure, a disaster, a big ol’ ruinous mess) or even that I don’t know where it comes from.
“Fiasco” is Italian. Working from Italian “fiamma” (flame) having the same origin as French “flamme,” and fiore/fleur (flower), and fiauto/flûte (flute), I can see that “fiasco” has that same fi/fl going on, so it’s gotta share its origin with “flasque” (flask, bottle).
The reason I look this word up all the time is that I do my little sound-change-arithmetic trick in my head, and then I think, “But why is a flask a catastrophe?”
I am here to tell you, and myself, definitively, for the last time: nobody knows.
In Italian, “fiasco” refers specifically to this rounded shape of wine bottle. Imaged sourced from Wikipedia.
The expression first shows up in English in 1855 in reference to disastrous theatrical or musical performances and quickly broadens its meaning to embarrassing failures of any kind. English gets the expression from French “faire fiasco,” which comes from Italian “far fiasco,” which literally means “to make a bottle.” Everybody agrees on all of that.
It’s the semantic “why” of it all where the dictionaries get contentious. The OED’s staying out of this one. All it has to say is that the expression is of “obscure origin; Italian etymologists have proposed various guesses, and alleged incidents in Italian theatrical history are related to account for it.” Is that not tantalizing? “Alleged incidents in Italian theatrical history” and then you don’t even give one tiny example? Did somebody spill a bottle of wine? Did somebody make a Molotov cocktail?
The Online Etymology Dictionary offers a survey of possibilities, and concludes with these two, which I like very much:
Klein suggests Venetian glass-crafters tossing aside imperfect pieces to be made later into common flasks. But according to an Italian dictionary, fare il fiasco used to mean "to play a game so that the one that loses will pay the fiasco," in other words, he will buy the next bottle (of wine). If the dates are not objectionable, that plausibly connects the literal sense of the word with the notion of "a costly mistake."
And since “fiasco” exists in French with this same meaning of failure, I checked the Trésor de la langue française and found yet another option:
Drawn from the Italian expression “fare fiasco” (to suffer a failure), first in speaking of a theatrical performance, where the meaning of fiasco is a calque in Italian of bouteille (bottle) “error”, which is what the French called it when Italian actors working in 18th-century France made language mistakes.
A “calque,” in case you need clarification, is a French word that means “copy,” and in linguistics, it refers translating a borrowed expression—for instance, a “skyscraper” in English is a “gratte-ciel” (literally, “scratch-sky”) in French, and many other languages also refer to very tall buildings with some variation on scrubbing, scratching, or scraping the sky, because they’re making their own version of “skyscraper.” A fun thing about discussing calques is that “calque” itself is a loanword, meaning English just straight-up stole it from French, while “loanword” is, in fact, a calque of German “Lehnwort,” meaning English took the concept from German and dressed it up in new clothes.
Anyway, what the TLF is trying to say is that mean 18th-century French theater-goers mocked Italian actors by calling their errors “bouteilles,” and Italians took that expression home with them, translated, and that’s how we got our current sense of “fiasco.” I find this traveling-from-France-to-Italy explanation a bit of a stretch, and I much prefer the “oops I messed up my blown glass” or “you buy the next bottle” versions above, although “alleged incidents in Italian theatrical history” does have its own mysterious allure. But since nobody has the last word on this one, we can all choose our own adventure—it ends in fiasco either way.
Speaking of vessels and their contents, in books that are neither Romance nor romance, I just finished Nona the Ninth, the latest book in Tamsyn Muir’s chaotic, labyrinthine, lesbian-necromancers-in-space series The Locked Tomb. I wrote at length about Gideon the Ninth here and a little bit about Harrow the Ninth here.
Right now I just wanna talk about my feelings. Nona has so much sweetness in it, so much “our little found family making a life however we can,” which was an unexpected but wonderful turn. Also, I have the biggest crush on Camilla Hect, the world’s most lethally competent, understated babe—except when she goes loud—and any time she’s on the page, I hang on her every little word and secret fidget. She is perfect. This book made me cry and I loved it.
Perhaps the best way to describe its impact on me is that normally when I finish a book, I open my next read. Seconds elapse between books. After Nona, I was so consumed with thinking about it that I didn’t read another novel for days. I did consider picking up Gideon for a reread, and even writing these few sentences has me itching to do just that.
In small-r romance, I did eventually get back to reading my usual happily-ever-afters, and here they are:
Strings Attached (m/f1 + m/f2 in a polyamorous vee, all cis and bi, contemporary, novella) by Suzanne Clay. What a little gem. This caught my attention immediately. It has vivid characters, three adults who’ve been best friends since high school, two of whom are married and a third, our protagonist, who is secretly pining for both of them. It also has one of the more realistic premises for “fake boyfriend” that I’ve encountered (the protagonist is a barista and one of her male customers won’t stop asking her out, he’s ignoring her refusals and her manager is ignoring the problem, but he might respect another man). I loved it so much that I immediately went looking for the sequel, gleefully anticipating the two women in this polyamorous vee getting together, but to my sorrow it’s not yet published. I’ll be there when it is. Content notes from the author.
All That They Desire (het f/bi m/pan m, all cis, contemporary) by Zoe York. Small towns in romance are just the best. They’re full of people taking care of each other, you get to root for everybody to find happiness, and your favorite main characters from previous books always show up again to give you a little glimpse of how well life is going. Everybody gossips, but never maliciously. And there’s always a bakery! This small town has a winery, too, and its owner is a queer man who’s a charming flirt who never wants to settle down—until he falls in love, separately and together, with a man and a woman whose marriage fell apart and might be under repair. I don’t think of myself as a reader who loves “marriage in trouble” as a trope, but maybe Zoe York just changed my mind. Watching two people who love each other figure out why they couldn’t make it work the first time around was so gratifying. This is make-you-swoon romantic, but in a grounded, real-life way where characters who need therapy get therapy. Also: it’s sexy as hell. Content notes from the author.
