The Italian word “fiasco” means, in its literal sense, a flask or bottle.
But at some time there became current among theatrical people of Italy the expression, far fiasco, which, though it actually means nothing more than “to make a bottle,” was used with exactly the same meaning that we convey when we say, “to make a mess of; to fail,” or in popular speech, “to pull a boner.”
So fiasco, in English use, came to mean complete and ignominious failure, but not even the most profound scholar in Italy can explain why “bottle” became a synonym for “flop.”
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