It’s kind of cool, when simple positive actions become habits…and then the results of those habits begin to be noticed. Simple things like taking a minute here and a minute there to do as many push ups as possible before jumping back on to the laptop and continuing to work, or taking 30 minutes out of the day to focus on learning something new – from how to measure acidity in a glass of wine to the origins of old sayings like “what a fiasco!”
Just a note: the term “what a fiasco can be traced back to several stories – and here are two of them:
Google’s primary explanation: “The French faire fiasco (to fail) was adopted in turn from the Italian far fiasco. When the term “fiasco” entered English in the mid-1800s, it meant “a failure or break-down in a dramatic or musical performance,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.”
Ah, but there is more to it than that….
Fiasco is one of the Italian words for a bottle (it’s related to English flask) and the idiom far fiasco, literally “make a bottle”, developed first among Italian theater and opera people in the eighteenth century to mean perpetrating a bad performance. Why? Because some of the actors would down a bottle or two before hopping onto the stage and performing their version of Cats. The result was a car-wreck of a performance.
Here’s another tidbit: some say that the term “what a fiasco” comes from the fact that some bottles of chianti wine are really poorly designed. They cannot stand on their own. So….they need to be encased in a wicker sheath. So the term basically sounds like sarcasm: picture 2 Italian guys drinking a bottle of chianti, when they remove the wicker wrapping from the wine bottle. They then try to stand it up, it immediately topples over and spills all over their Zenga suits. One looks at the other and says “hey paisan – look at dis! Wadda fiasco, eh?”
Last note: this month’s Runners World magazine has an article that simply rocked. This dude is my hero.
