THE ORIGINAL "FIASCO"

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 52, 29 August 1925, Page 16

THE ORIGINAL "FIASCO"

HOW THE WORD WAS EVOLVED.

The word "fiasco" has become current coin in English speech, though it is doubtful if many who use it know that it. is an Italian word meaning'bottle, says the "Argonaut." Several accounts have been given of why an immediate failure is called a bottle. A correspondent of "Notes and Queries" wrote in 1863 :—

"Some years since, Sighor V. Pistmcci, professor o£ Italian at King's College, gavo ma the following derivation. . . . A gentleman visiting: an Italian glass manufactory was struck with tho apparent simplicity of the work, so he asked permission to try his hand at glass-blowing, but found tho operation more difficult than it' looked, and the only thing he was able to produce was the common flask (fiasco). The amused workmen crowded Toutid him. and greeted each successive-■ failure with laughter' and the cry of 'Altro fiasco! ultro fias co !' " (Another fiasco.) ' Another story to the point appeared in tho London "Daily Graphic" in 1890: "An Italian contemporary, in reviewing the past musical season, adopted recently a system of symbols which we may commend to the "notice of English I journalists. Appended to tho notice of each new opera was tho picture of a J wine flask, which varied in size with the degree of failure achieved by the particular work. Everyone who remembers that the word 'fiasco'—popularised as a synonym with failure—is really Italian for a flask, will porceive the convenient possibilities opened up by j his method. At present tho critic is ' often compelled to write 'wholo columns, of which the whole gist might be; comprised in two words. How much better it would bo if we adopted tho dplightfully terse symbolism thus Bug- ; gested! One column would be reserved : every week : the nanio of the pieces j would be sot down, nnd opposite we ', should put a, finely graduated series of wine flasks, showing- the precise degree of good and ill success attained,"