With the Winter Olympics getting under way in (currently snow-free) Vancouver, it is perhaps reasonable to include a word for the terror or delight of coming down a slope at great speed. The French verb dégringoler can be dusted off: from it the English have derived a noun that is much more commonly used in the figurative sense, to mean
a rapid descent; deterioration, decadence; change from bad to worse
So, from a 1959 issue of the magazine Encounter (which underwent its own dégringolade when it was found to be taking money from the CIA) we have "...the hero...underwent a convincing but totally unsensational degringolade, taking, not to drugs or drink, but to an increasing sluggishness." We do not know what then happened to the aforesaid hero. Encounter, however, went bust.
