Word of the Day!

pied-à-terre [pee-ey-duh-tair, -dah-, pyey-]

noun:
a residence, as an apartment, for secondary, part-time or temporary use

Examples:

Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax, which targets high-value second homes that owners use only part of the year, is intuitively appealing. (Robert P Inman and Michael S Knoll, Mamdani Wants to Tax Your Second Home. Here's A Better Idea., Barron's, April 2026)

Indeed, the apartment's proximity to Paris's most iconic attractions, from the Seine and Eiffel Tower, to Hôtel des Invalides, Musée d'Orsay, Musée Rodin and Le Bon Marché make it the ultimate pied-à-terre for its three owners, who plan to use it as both a holiday home and base for longer European sojourns. (Yeong Sassall, This stylishly decorated classic Parisian pied-à-terre is shared by three owners, Vogue Australia, June 2025)

It was situated in one of those quiet squares which lie, like placid backwaters, off the seething rivers of London. And its chief point of interest lay in the fact that it formed the invariable pied-a-terre of Mr Blackton when visiting England in whatever character he might at the moment be assuming. (Sapper, The Third Round)

What they wanted to find was a smallish house in a pleasant village or country town, which they could furnish with the things they did not wish to part from, and keep as a pied-à-terre. They might decide to travel for a time, or pay visits, but there would always be this place of their own to come back to. (Anna Masterton Buchan, quoted in Henry James Warner, The Proper Place)

The house in Wilton Street was a small bijou place which my father had occupied as a pied-à-terre in town, he being a widower. (William Le Queux, Hushed Up! A Mystery of London)

Origin:
'small town house or rooms used for short residences,' 1829, French, pied à terre, literally 'foot on the ground.' (Online Etymology Dictionary)

When your friend talks about his pied-a-terre in the city, it's just his fancy way of mentioning the apartment he keeps there to stay in from time to time. This borrowing from French, literally 'foot on ground,' designates a small second home. Dictionaries are in general content to stop their explanation of the origins of pied-a-terre by simply translating it, as if this were sufficient to explain how it inherited this meaning. On the other hand, it would hardly be a home if you didn't have your foot on the ground there some time. (Vocabulary.com)

bricolage [bree-kuh-lahzh, brik-uh-]

noun:
1 a construction made of whatever materials are at hand; something created from a variety of available things.
2 (in literature) a piece created from diverse resources.
3 (in art) a piece of makeshift handiwork.
4 the use of multiple, diverse research methods.

Examples:

Billed as fiction, this creative-critical work is a bricolage of archival research, colonial histories, transcribed conversations, ghost stories, memoir, epistolary address, reimagined pasts, speculative and suspended futures. (Jenny Hedley, A technology to remember and forget: André Dao’s Anam, Overland, August 2023)

That resourcefulness has developed into an art of exhilarating bricolage, of functioning objects that are greater than the sum of their pieced-together parts. (Andrew Russeth, Tom Sachs: Rocket Man to Renaissance Man, New York Times, July 2022)

This distinction also escapes a number of creative writing researchers who have adapted bricolage as a research methodology. They enumerate the benefits without sufficiently acknowledging the drawbacks, which include superficiality, overgeneralisation and misinterpretation of the theories and practices of other disciplines. (Jeri Kroll, 'The writer as interlocutor: The benefits and drawbacks of bricolage in creative writing research', Journal of writing and writing courses, 2021)

Her bricolage approach to songwriting is fairly obviously that of someone raised with streaming’s decontextualised smorgasbord as their primary source of music. You can hear it in the way she leaps from one source to another, unburdened by considerations of genre or longstanding notions of cool, like someone compiling a personal playlist. (Alexis Petridis, PinkPantheress: Fancy That review – sharp-minded bops hop across pop’s past and present, The Guardian, May 2025)

The system eventually introduced for Big Bang reflected this fragility and contingency of infrastructures: it was the creative result of reshaping legacy devices into a system that did the job for the time being. A band-aid. A product of creative, recombinant bricolage. (Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets)

Origin:
term used in arts and literature, 'work made from available things,' by 1966, via Lévi-Strauss, from French bricolage, from bricoler 'to fiddle, tinker' and, by extension, 'make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are to hand (regardless of their original purpose),' 16c, from bricole (14c) (Online Etymology Dictionary)

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'). (Merriam-Webster)

ormolu [awr-muh-loo]

adjective:
1 Any of several copper and zinc or tin alloys resembling gold in appearance and used to ornament furniture, moldings, architectural details, and jewelry
2 an imitation of gold.

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Clars had described the clocks in its auction catalog as 'a rare pair of Chinese ormolu bronze automaton clocks' manufactured in a workshop in the southern port city of Guangzhou. (Steven Lee Myers and Graham Bowley, They Look Like the Emperors' Clocks. But Are They Real?, The New York Times, December 2018)

No gilded ormolu appears, certainly, but pieces are not without decorative flourishes. (Antonia van der Meer, Hemingway’s Homey Cuban House, The Wall Street Journal, June 2016)

He claimed almost 100 items had been stolen, including a Persian rug worth £35,000, valuable antiques and clocks, and a 19th century red marble rococo fire surround, with ormolu inserts. (Nina Morgan, St Albans fraudster who staged burglary and committed £1m mortgage fraud jailed, Herts Advertiser, January 2019)

He was rather sorry he had come, till Lady Narborough, looking at the great ormolu gilt clock that sprawled in gaudy curves on the mauve-draped mantelshelf, exclaimed: "How horrid of Henry Wotton to be so late!" (Oscar Wilde, The Picture Of Dorian Gray)

Origin:
1765, 'an alloy of copper, zinc, and tin resembling gold,' from French or moulu, literally 'ground gold,' from or 'gold' (from Latin aurum, from PIE aus- 'gold;' see aureate) + moulu 'ground up,' past participle of moudre 'to grind,' from Latin molere 'to grind' (from PIE root mele- 'to crush, grind'). The sense of the word before it reached English began as 'gold leaf prepared for gilding bronze, brass, etc.,' then shifted to 'gilded bronze,' then to various prepared metallic substances resembling it. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

contretemps [kon-truh-tahn, kawntruh-tahn]

noun:
1 a minor dispute or disagreement
2 an inopportune occurrence; an embarrassing mischance

Examples:

It’s enough to make an artistic director throw up a white flag, though Sachs’ decision to retire had nothing to do with this latest contretemps. (Charles McNulty, Stephen Sachs documents an American family torn apart by Jan. 6 in his new play, Los Angeles Times, March 2024)

Shiffrin has won so often, in fact, that when she skips a race, or two, it spawns a minor contretemps. (Bill Pennington, Mikaela Shiffrin Wows Skiing When She Races - and When She Doesn't, The New York Times, February 2019)

The latest in this series of contretemps between the Congress president and the BJP is the rebuttal by Arun Jaitley, currently union minister without portfolio, who felt compelled to take on Rahul in a Facebook post a day after he got home from hospital following a kidney transplant. (Sujata Anandan, Saving the drowning farmer , Salon, June 2018)

This little domestic contretemps is then, I presume, disagreeable to you! (E Phillips Oppenheim, The Yellow Crayon)

She had meant to take a stroll herself before breakfast, but saw that the day was still sacred to men, and amused herself by watching their contretemps. (E M Forster, Howards End)

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When contretemps first appeared in English in the 1600s, it did so in the context of fencing: a contretemps was a thrust or pass made at the wrong time, whether the wrongness of the time had to do with one’s lack of skill or an opponent's proficiency. From the fencing bout contretemps slid gracefully onto the dance floor, a contretemps being a step danced on an unaccented beat. Both meanings are in keeping with the word’s French roots, contre- (meaning 'counter') and temps (meaning 'time'). (The word’s English pronunciation is also in keeping with those roots: \KAHN-truh-tahn\.) By the late 1700s, contretemps had proved itself useful outside of either activity by referring to any embarrassing or inconvenient mishap - something out of sync or rhythm with social conventions. The sense meaning 'dispute' or 'argument' arrived relatively recently, in the 20th century, perhaps coming from the idea that if you step on someone’s toes, literally or figuratively, a scuffle might ensue. (Merriam-Webster)

bagatelle [bag-uh-tel]

noun:
1 something of little value or importance; a trifle
2 a game played on a board having holes at one end into which balls are to be struck with a cue
3 a short literary or musical piece in light style

Examples:

If anything, the slowly accumulating final chord of the bagatelle could have set up the softly arpeggiated one at the start of 'Twilight Way', the first of the 'Poetic Tone Pictures.' (Joshua Barone, Review: Dvorak’s 'Poetic Tone Pictures’ Makes Its Carnegie Debut, New York Times, February 2023)

Pinball got its start in 18th-century France with the billiardslike tabletop game bagatelle, which used a springlike launcher. (World-ranked pinball wizard is reviving the game in San Antonio with a new startup, san Antonio Express-News, March 2020)

When you are caught in a web of conspiracies, the best of deeds becomes a mere bagatelle, as we find in the fall of Udensi. (Henry Akubuiro, Travails of a Good Samaritan , The Sun Nigeria, March 2021)

Among the most divisive issues in philosophy today is whether there is anything important to be said about the essential nature of truth. Bullshit, by contrast, might seem to be a mere bagatelle. (Jim Holt, Say Anything, The New Yorker, August 2005)

'Overdue; was the title he had decided for it, and its length he believed would not be more than sixty thousand words - a bagatelle for him with his splendid vigor of production. (Jack London, Martin Eden)

The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is a lifelong regret. (Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love)

Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ - all gone, and jewels, too. (Virginia Woolf, 'The Mark on the Wall')

Origin:

1630s, 'a trifle, thing of no importance,' from French bagatelle 'knick-knack, bauble, trinket' (16c.), from Italian bagatella 'a trifle,' which is perhaps a diminutive of Latin baca 'berry,' or from one of the continental words (such as Old French bague 'bundle') from the same source as English bag. As 'a piece of light music,' it is attested from 1827. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

recalcitrant [ri-kal-si-truhnt]

adjective:
1 resisting authority or control; not obedient or compliant; refractory.
2 hard to deal with, manage, or operate.

But Smith managed to rally and to learn, through trial and error, how to milk what he needed out of an often recalcitrant medical system. (Gina Kolata, Taking Charge, The New York Times, September 1997)

With the passage of decades, facts are difficult to unearth, and emotions and motivations are even more recalcitrant. (Julia M Klein, What to do when family history is radioactive? Work around stonewalling relatives, Los Angeles Times, August2021)

The new Cabinet had to deal with religious conflict, refugee flight, food scarcities, recalcitrant princely states, and oversee the framing of a new Constitution. (Ramachandra Guha, Shed partisanship, reach out to the best minds, Hindustan Times, April 2020)

She greeted him now as though he were a recalcitrant member of the family, rather than a menacing outsider. (F Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited)

Origin:

'refusing to submit, not submissive or compliant,' 1823, from French récalcitrant, literally 'kicking back' (17c-18c), from Late Latin recalcitrantem (nominative recalcitrans), present participle of recalcitrare 'to kick back' (of horses), also 'be inaccessible,' in Late Latin 'to be petulant or disobedient;' from re- 'back' (see re-) + Latin calcitrare 'to kick,' from calx (genitive calcis) 'heel'. Used from 1797 as a French word in English. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

Long before any human was dubbed 'recalcitrant' in English (that first occurred in the 18th century), there were stubborn mules (and horses) kicking back their heels. The ancient Romans noted as much (Pliny the Elder among them), and they had a word for it: recalcitrare, which literally means 'to kick back.' (Its root calc-, meaning 'heel,' is also the root of calcaneus, the large bone of the heel in humans.) Certainly Roman citizens in Pliny's time were sometimes willful and hardheaded - as attested by various Latin words meaning 'stubborn' - but it wasn't until later that writers of Late Latin applied recalcitrare and its derivative adjective to humans who were stubborn as mules. (Merriam-Webster)

incommensurable [in-kuh-men-ser-uh-buhl, -sher-]

adjective:
1 having no common basis, measure, or standard of comparison
2 utterly disproportionate
3 (of two or more quantities) having no common measure

Examples:

As the late philosopher Lawrence Becker proclaimed, 'autonomous human lives have a dignity that is immeasurable, incommensurable, infinite, beyond price.' (Frank Martela, Be Yourself - Everyone Else Is Taken, Scientific American, March 2020)

In Sewing Machine, 2000, the mechanism's operator - this time male - seems not to be sewing at all, but conducting some kind of shamanistic ritual that sends the other figures populating the painting's hallucinatory space into their own incommensurable realms of reverie. (Barry Schwabsky, Bass Culture, Artforum, January 2025)

In other words, spaces created with unmeasurable elements, which give an illusion of incommensurable continuity. (Cullen Murphy, An American Art Critic's 70-Year Love Affair With Rome, The Atlantic, November 2022)

Gringoire enjoyed seeing, feeling, fingering, so to speak an entire assembly (of knaves, it is true, but what matters that ?) stupefied, petrified, and as though asphyxiated in the presence of the incommensurable tirades which welled up every instant from all parts of his bridal song. (Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris)

How on earth can a set of events belonging to one order be experienced as a set of events belonging to an entirely different and incommensurable order? Nobody has the faintest idea. (Aldous Huxley, Island)

Origin:

"having no common measure," 1550s, from French incommensurable (14c) or directly from Medieval Latin incommensurabilis, from in- "not, opposite of, without" + Late Latin commensurabilis, from Latin com "with, together" + mensurabilis "measurable," from mensurare "to measure," from Latin mensura "a measuring, a measurement; thing to measure by," from mensus, past participle of metiri "to measure" me- "to measure"). (Online Etymology Dictionary)

mélange [mey-lahnzh, -lahnj]

noun:
a mixture sometimes of incongruous elements, a medley

Examples:

Made with a mouliné yarn which twists two colored threads together for a mélange effect, the cardigan is both chunky and cloud-like with a plush, wide shawl collar and tailored fit. (Gerald Ortiz, The Best Cashmere Sweaters for Men Are Literally Goated, GQ, November 2024)

The plot can sometimes feel like a chaotic mélange stretched too thin, but White, who wrote the Illumination avian charmer 'Migration', elevates the overall narrative by injecting doses of his perennial interest in the social codes of the rich. (Lovia Gyarkye, 'Despicable Me 4' Review: Gru's Family Grows in Illumination Animation That Serves Up Familiar Antics, The Hollywood Reporter, June 2024)

Baseball at the highest club level in Britain is competitive, but it's a league in which babysitters are just as important as balls and strikes. Teams are a mélange of locals and expats - some with college and minor league experience (Ken Maguire, In the UK's top baseball league, crowds are small, babysitters are key and the Mets are a dynasty, The Seattle Times, June 2024)

I invoke your consideration of the scene - the marble-topped tables, the range of leather-upholstered wall seats, the gay company, the ladies dressed in demi-state toilets, speaking in an exquisite visible chorus of taste, economy, opulence or art; the sedulous and largess-loving garcons, the music wisely catering to all with its raids upon the composers; the mélange of talk and laughter - and, if you will, the Wurzburger in the tall glass cones that bend to your lips as a ripe cherry sways on its branch to the beak of a robber jay. (O Henry, The Four Million)

Here he kept a retinue of Kaffirs, who were literally his slaves; and hence he would sally, with enormous diamonds in his shirt and on his finger, in the convoy of a prize-fighter of heinous repute, who was not, however, by any means the worst element in the Rosenthall mélange. (E W Hornung, The Amateur Cracksman)

Origin:

'a mixture, a medley,' usually 'an uncombined mingling on elements, objects, or individuals,' 1650s, from French mélange (15c.), from mêler 'to mix, mingle,' from Old French mesler 'to mix, meddle, mingle' (Online Etymology Dictionary)

Mélange got mixed into the melting pot of English back in the 1600s. It derives from the Middle French verb mesler, which means 'to mix.' 'Mélange' is actually one of several French contributions to the English body of words for miscellaneous mixtures. (Merriam-Webster).