Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993.
shambles (n.)
is always plural in form but either singular or plural in construction. In Old English a shamble was “a bench or footstool.” It developed additional senses, specializing into “a counter for displaying wares,” then “a meat counter,” then “a meat market,” and then “a slaughterhouse.” During the seventeenth century a transferred sense developed from the “slaughterhouse” meaning: “something that looks like a slaughterhouse, any blood-covered mess.” And finally in the 1920s, semantic change caused the “bloody” aspect to disappear from the most widely used sense: the meaning generalized to “a scene of general disorder and devastation”: His room was a shambles: nothing was picked up or put away. Today in that meaning the word is a hyperbole and almost a cliché.
