Word of the Day

: May 27, 2014

bricolage

noun bree-koh-LAHZH

What It Means

: construction (as of a sculpture or a structure of ideas) achieved by using whatever comes to hand; also : something constructed in this way

bricolage in Context

Knowing that the motor was assembled from a hasty bricolage of junk parts, Raphael had little hope that it would run effectively.

"Hustad reconstructs the past through a bricolage of interviews, letters, newspaper articles, Bible verses, prayers and anecdotes…." - From a book review by Justin St. Germain in The New York Times, March 23, 2014

Did You Know?

According to French social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the artist "shapes the beautiful and useful out of the dump heap of human life." Lévi-Strauss compared this artistic process to the work of a handyman who solves technical or mechanical problems with whatever materials are available. He referred to that process of making do as "bricolage," a term derived from the French verb "bricoler" (meaning "to putter about") and related to "bricoleur," the French name for a jack-of-all-trades. "Bricolage" made its way from French to English during the 1960s, and it is now used for everything from the creative uses of leftovers ("culinary bricolage") to the cobbling together of disparate computer parts ("technical bricolage").