“Shambolic” is based on the word “shambles,” meaning “great disorder,” with the suffix “-olic” possibly borrowed from “symbolic.” The term “shambolic” has been in use since the early 1950s, though in the 1980s, William Safire noted in his “New York Times” column “On Language” that it was a slang term popular among “our British cousins.” The first citation of the term in the Oxford English Dictionary dates to an issue of “The Times of London” in 1970, but the term took off among English speakers worldwide in the 2010s.