It depends on your tone.įor example, you could complain about the farrago of thoughts that keep you up at night, the farrago of asinine and loosely-enforced rules in your office, or the farrago of grammar errors all over your homework assignment. You can use it as a colorful insult, a warm compliment, or anything in between. When the phrase "hot mess" is too slangy and casual, pick the rare, sophisticated word "farrago." It helps you describe a messy array or collection, one that's at least slightly unpleasant. You probably won't need a plural noun, but if you do, you can spell it "farragos" or "farragoes." There's a rare adjective, "farraginous." And an even rarer one that I think we should popularize, "farraginary." We use it most often in the singular: "a farrago of hair accessories " "a farrago of half-truths, bald lies, and cherry-picked data points." In other words, a farrago is a mishmash, a hodgepodge, a heap of various things. In English, a farrago of things is a messy or jumbled mixture of things. We took the word "farrago" straight from Latin, where it meant both "a mixture of different grains to feed to animals" and "a various mixture or medley of anything." (To reveal any word with blanks, give it a click.) definition: Bonus points if you can recall not just the words, but also the type of dish that each literally refers to! Those last three synonyms all imply comparisons to various dishes that are, in fact, suitable for human consumption. We could have called it a jumble, a mishmash, a hodgepodge, an o_o, a sal_g_di, or a b_ll_b_sse. Send us feedback about these examples.If you're like me, you've got a drawer somewhere that holds a farrago of paper clips, mysterious keys, tiny screwdrivers that you'll need as soon as you throw them away, light bulbs of dubious wattage, and expired coupons that you definitely should have used.īy calling that whole mess a farrago, we're comparing it to a heap of various grains, suitable for animals to eat but not so much for humans. These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'farrago.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. 2021 In the weeks after the November election, Dobbs had spent most of his prime-time hour on a farrago of conspiracy theories about how Donald Trump had actually defeated Joe Biden. 2021 In that now-infamous press conference, Biden unloosed a farrago of wishful thinking, happy talk, half-truths, and blatant deceptions. 2021 The comparison doesn’t exactly flatter Pearce’s movie, an uneven farrago of science-fiction thriller and child abduction drama just about held together by Ahmed’s forceful and committed performance as a man teetering on the brink. 2022 This farrago of nonsense was ridiculed by critics, yet was a considerable best seller, his last. Los Angeles Times, The New York Times recently spent 10,000 words straining to discover that Ukraine is a central preoccupation of Vladimir Putin (a thing known for more than a decade) and then reading this back as some new insight into the collusion farrago. 2020 Director John Gould Rubin bears much of the blame for the ensuing farrago, though no one could accomplish this level of confusion alone. Barnaby Crowcroft, National Review, 26 Dec. 2023 The picture, in short, is a farrago of nonsense. Jacob Silverman, The New Republic, 13 Apr. Recent Examples on the Web National security cases, especially around the leaking of classified material, inevitably become farragoes of complex procedural rulings and limitations on defendants’ ability to launch a coherent defense.
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