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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

Is "a Shambles" British or something? I've always heard it as "in Shambles"

AFAICT ”a shambles” is correct usage. See https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/24/in-shambles-a-shambles/

Neat, but don't know if I can switch because of how it rolls off the tongue.

It got easier for me once I learned that "shambles" is a noun that is a synonym of "slaughterhouse". Once I learned that, I emphasized shambles slightly differently as I rolled the phrase off my tongue.

"SHA-1 is a slaughterhouse"

"SHA-1 is a shambles"

Yeah I got that from the link, I had no idea before. However, I feel like if it was "is a shamble" it would make more sense to me than "is a shambles".

Downvoted. There's no ISO standard for English, since language is a social phenomenon. "Correct" language is whatever the community of speakers uses in practice, not what someone claims is correct in a blog post (or even a book).

And the linked article showed you that, in practice, "a shambles" is perfectly correct English. It is therefore correct in a descriptivist sense.

Beyond that prefixing your comment by "downvoted" is frankly silly and only serves to derail the conversation IMO.

"a shambles" is not used (or quite rarely used) in North America, in my experience. Which was what the OP was asking about.

You are of course right that "a shambles" is perfectly fine British English, but that's beside the point.

I'm in North America and have never heard ‘in shambles’, without ‘a’. If I did, I'd probably take it as uneducated sociolect.

Fascinating. I'm guessing it's a regional thing where certain parts of the US say "in shambles" vs. "a shambles" vs. "in a shambles".

Not sure how it would be measured, but I think a /r/dataisbeautiful map would be interesting to see.

NYC here, never have heard it with an 'a'. Its always just 'in shambles'.

> And the linked article showed you that, in practice, "a shambles" is perfectly correct English.

I'd think "in practice" would mean evidence of contemporary usage.

...for traditional use, maybe, but any editor worth their salt will stop you from doing so. At least in America. Many words have changed their meaning and use over the last 500 years.

Yes, at least where I live in the south of the UK. Other phrases you might hear are "What a shambles", "That is an absolute shambles" or "Omnishambles"

"Omnishambles" has a fun etymology - it comes from the political satire "The Thick of It": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnishambles

It's a word for a meat market, or a butcher's shop, in other words – a bloody mess.

Yes; in addition to the other comments, there is also the shambles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shambles

(nowadays devoid of mead products but a nice picturesque place to visit if you can stand crowds. Try the bookshop)

I live in York and I haven't actually gone into any shops in the Shambles...

"Far be the thought of this from Henry's heart, To make a shambles of the parliament-house!"

-Shakespeare (Henry VI, Part 3)

Note that in Shakespeare's time an audience would directly have understood "make a shambles" here to mean violent bloodshed in the parliament building because a "shambles" would have been a common term for somewhere you killed animals to produce meat. Which is exactly what is being described here. Henry VI part 3 is not a play about a polite disagreement settled over lunch...

Today "shambles" remains in the common vocabulary, but only in a sense of things being messy or disorganised, most English readers today probably wouldn't think of literal violence and I suppose that the people who named this website, likewise, were thinking of modern usage.

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