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.
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".
...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.
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).
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"
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.
