fiasco

Fiasco comes from Italian fiasco, meaning "bottle" or "flask," which traces back through Late Latin flasca to a Frankish word for a container, and ultimately to Proto-Germanic *flaskǭ.

The leap from "bottle" to "failure" happened in Italian theatrical slang, in the phrase far fiasco, literally "to make a bottle." The exact reason is uncertain, but one guess ties it to a game where the loser had to buy the next round of drinks — so a fiasco began, perhaps, as the price of losing.

Fiasco is a doublet of flask, flagon, and flacon — all descendants of the same root word for a bottle, just carried into English by different routes.