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fiasco: msg#00004

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Subject: fiasco

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The Word of the Day for March 5 is:

fiasco \fee-ASK-oh\ noun
: a complete failure

Example sentence:
When she heard that the DJ was running late and the caterers were
lost, Mary just knew that the party she'd been planning for weeks was
going to be an utter fiasco.

Did you know?
English speakers picked up "fiasco" from the French, who adopted it
from the Italian phrase "fare fiasco" -- literally, "to make a bottle."
Just what prompted the development of the meaning "failure" from "bottle"
has remained obscure. One guess is that when a Venetian glassblower
discovered a flaw developing in a beautiful piece he was working on, he
would turn it into an ordinary bottle to avoid having to destroy the
object. The bottle would naturally represent a failure of his art to the
glassblower. This theory, however, remains without evidence to support it.





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