[a. (in sense 2 through F.) It. fiasco (see FLASK) lit. ‘a flask, bottle.’
The fig. use of the phrase far fiasco (lit. ‘to make a bottle’) in the sense ‘to break down or fail in a performance is of obscure origin; Italian etymologists have proposed various guesses, and alleged incidents in Italian theatrical history are related to account for it.]
ǁ 1. A bottle, flask.
1887. Athenæum, 12 Nov., 635/3. He [Trollope] lived in Florence in the days of the Grand Duke, before the fair city was modernized, and when a fiasco of good Chianti could be had for a paul.
2. A failure or break-down in a dramatic or musical performance. Also in a general sense: An ignominious failure, a ‘mull.’
1855. Ld. Lonsdale, in Croker Papers (1884), 2 Feb., III. xxix. 325. Derby has made what the theatrical people call a fiasco.
1868. M. Pattison, Academ. Org., vii. 329. We have had lately had some rude reminders—in the fiasco of our railway system, in the catastrophe which in a few weeks ruined the edifice of our credit, in the incapacity of our boasted self-government to secure us the most indispensable sanitary regulations—that there is something wrong, somewhere, which is not want of energy of purpose.
1879. Farrar, St. Paul, II. 347. The people and their priests begged him [Festus] as an initial favour not to exempt Paul’s case from their cognisance, but to bring him to Jerusalem, that he might once more be tried by the Sanhedrin, when they would take care that he should cause no second fiasco by turning their theologic jealousies against each other.
