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I plugged the word shambles into The New York Times to check whether or not my use of the word to mean “a disorganized mess” was consistent with what other people might mean when they use the word.

It was, but I almost wish I hadn’t looked.

According to the search results we are all in deep trouble

• the economy is in a shambles
• the transportation network is a shambles
• Iraq is in a shambles
• the Democratic Party is a shambles
• John McCain’s campaign appears to be in shambles

The list goes on.

So let’s leave those depressing search results and look instead at why we think being in a shambles is such a bad thing.

Although the word is a very old one it was only 1926 when it came to mean what all those doom and gloom citations meant.

Back in Latin scamnum meant a stool or bench.  As the Romans rubbed up against the Germanic peoples before the Anglo Saxons took over England this word for stool was adopted into Germanic.

So when Old English eventually did become a recognizable language in its own right scomul was one of the words they used for a stool.  We have citations for this word back to the year 825.

But what is a stool but a miniature table and as logic would have it by the year 971 sceomolas took on the meaning of table or counter.

In particular these tables and counters were ones set out on market days and they were the work surface that people used to do their trade.

The word seems to have broken in two from here; in one direction the whole marketplace started to be called the shambles and some old towns still have place names of streets or commons based on this use.

But the direction we are more interested in here is the narrowing of use of shambles from meaning “a market stall” generally to meaning a market stall specializing in meats.

If the table at the market where you bought your meat was called a shambles—and by 1305 it was—then didn’t it make sense to call the abattoir a shambles too?  It was by 1548.

Now an abattoir or slaughterhouse is a pretty messy place with all that blood and guts splattered all over the place.  It is common coin among language users to try and hype their message by overdoing a comparison.  If your office is a big mess someone will really be getting the message across that they think it’s a mess if they call it an abattoir.

So that’s what brought us the current meaning less than 100 years ago.