shambles [OE] ‘Over the period of a thousand years shambles, from Latin scamnum ‘a bench’, has moved from being ‘a stool’ and ‘a counter for displaying goods for sale’, to ‘a state of total disorder’. The link lies in covered butchers’ stalls in market places, a use which in Britain survives in street names, notably the Shambles in York, a narrow winding medieval street. In the mid 16th century a shambles became also ‘a place for slaughtering animals for meat’, and later in the same century ‘a place of carnage’. The less bloody modern sense did not appear until the 20th century, in the USA. As a description of ungainly movement, to shamble [L17th] may derive from shamble legs, a description of misshapen legs that probably refers to the splayed legs of the trestles of a butcher’s stall.