debacle
An event or enterprise that ends suddenly and disastrously, often with humiliating consequences.
Noun
- An event or enterprise that ends suddenly and disastrously, often with humiliating consequences.
- The event proved to be a great debacle for the partisans of this prognosticator. - 1952, Boaz Cohen, Epistle to Yemen, translation of original by Maimonides, page 5:
- The result is a military approach which maximizes political tensions with Russia […] and lays the ground for a military debacle. - 1996, Richard L. Canby, “SOF: An Alternative Perspective on Doctrine”, in Schultz et al,...
- The BP Prudhoe Bay debacle [the Prudhoe Bay oil spill] thus provides but the latest in a long line of reasons why leasing this region of the NPR-A is a bad idea. - 2007, “Statement by Peter Van Tuyn”, in BP pipeline...
Synonyms: fiasco
- A breaking up of a natural dam, usually made of ice, by a river and the ensuing rush of water.
- […] so that in extreme cases the latter may even be dammed up for a time, and a debacle be the consequence, when the main river overcomes the resistance opposed to it, […] - 1836, Henry De La Beche, How to Observe:...
- For several months after the debacle just described, the river Dranse, having no settled channel, shifted its position continually […] - 1837, John Lee Comstock, Outlines of Geology, page 51:
- When this débâcle commences […], the masses of ice, drifting with the current and unable to pass, are hurled upon those already soldered together; thus an enormous barrier is formed […] - 1872, Annual Report of the...
Origin
From French débâcle, from débâcler (“to unbar; unleash”) from prefix dé- (“un-”) + bâcler (“to dash, bind, bar, block”) [perhaps from unattested Middle French and Old French *bâcler, *bacler (“to hold in place, prop a door or window open”)], from Vulgar Latin *bacculare, from Latin baculum (“rod, staff used for support”), from Proto-Indo-European *bak-. Also attested in Old French desbacler (“to clear a harbour by getting ships unloaded to make room for incoming ships with lading”) and in Occitan baclar (“to close”). The hypothesised derivation from Middle Dutch *bakkelen (“to freeze artificially, lock in place”), a frequentative of bakken (“to stick, stick hard, glue together”) no longer seems likely due to the lack of attestation of *bakkelen in Middle Dutch and by it having the limited meaning of "freeze superficially" in Dutch.