bricolage

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The Word of the Day for May 22 is:

bricolage   \bree-koh-LAHZH\   noun
     : construction achieved by using whatever comes to hand; also : something 
constructed in this way

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

Did you know?
     According to French social anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the artist 
"shapes the beautiful and useful out of the dump heap of human life." 
Levi-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 in 1966, when Levi-Strauss's _The Savage Mind_ was 
translated from his native tongue to ours. Now it is used for everything from 
the creative uses of leftovers ("culinary bricolage") to the cobbling together 
of disparate computer parts ("technical bricolage").





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