Word of the Day

: December 12, 2024

pastiche

noun pass-TEESH

What It Means

Pastiche refers to something (such as a piece of writing, music, etc.) that imitates the style of someone or something else. It can also refer to a work that is made up of selections from multiple other works, or it can be used as a synonym of hodgepodge.

// The director’s new murder mystery is a clever pastiche of the 1950s noir films she watched as a girl.

// The research paper was essentially a pastiche made up of passages from different sources.

// The house is decorated in a pastiche of mid-century styles.

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pastiche in Context

“[Ween] were the rare American college radio darlings to directly engage with Black music, by reinforcing the spiritual connections between glam rock and funk and psychedelia. ... But if their early displays of Prince worship blurred the line between pastiche and parody, Chocolate and Cheese offered their most sincere simulacrums of funk and soul to date.” — Stuart Berman, Pitchfork, 1 Sept. 2024

Did You Know?

When we say the origins of the word pastiche are totally tubular, we’re not just being saucy—we mean it. In Italian, pasticcio (more specifically pasticcio di maccheroni) refers to a decadent pie consisting of a sweet crust filled with meat, truffles, béchamel, and macaroni—that famously tube-shaped pasta. Given such a jumble of (albeit delicious) ingredients, it makes sense that pasticcio in Italian has also long carried such additional meanings as “a mess or confused affair” and “a confused or mixed piece of writing.” It is these meanings that influenced both the English word pasticcio, in use since the 18th century, and the French word pastiche, which English borrowed in the late 19th century and which is now much more common. Both refer to hodgepodges of all kinds, but are most often applied to creative works—literary, artistic, musical, architectural, etc.—that imitate earlier styles or that are made up of parts from other works. A pastiche, you might say, takes a little bit of this and a little bit of that, not unlike the English language itself.