Weekly Word: Bricolage
Unfortunately, I’m socially well-adjusted and easily understood, according to this little Vocabulary Quiz from Word Sell. One word I thought I knew was bricolage. “Oh, bricolage, I’ve heard that before! Isn’t it — no, never mind. Maybe it was — no, that’s Ricola. Argh!” I guess I’m not as much of a word nerd as I thought.
It turns out that a bricolage is “a construction made of whatever materials are at hand”.
Wikipedia’s entry on bricolage lists uses of the word in different disciplines, from postmodern art to programming. It also says this about its etymology:
It is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler — equivalent to the English “do-it-yourself”, the core meaning in French being, however, “fiddle, tinker”…
I love the sound of bricolage. Even though it makes me think of Swiss alphorns, it sounds so wonderfully French! I also love the concepts behind it: DIY (do it yourself), creativity, variety, practicality, frugality… What’s not to love?
July 4th, 2007
If it makes you feel any better, I don’t know too many of those words myself. Usually my words are the ones I have to look up when I’m reading a book. You are right about one thing–bricolage is fun to say. Hard to work into a conversation, though.
July 5th, 2007
Thanks, that does make me feel better.
I really should read more books. I do plenty of reading online, but we internet folk don’t use them fancy book-learnin’ words.
July 6th, 2007
“a construction made of whatever materials are at hand”.
made me think of brick-collage, which in turn made me think of legos, which in turn made me think of the things I used to build with what I had at hand. haha
btw thanks for your comment earlier, I do use Stumbleupon and have got some great spurts of traffic, but I guess I’m just not interesting enough to maintain any subscribers! Oh well, I enjoy my random posting…
oh and your PHP/Mysql vids were great help!