Bricoleur

Hello and welcome to Word of the Week! I’m your host, Liz. This podcast is dedicated to words and phrases that are untranslatable into English. Let’s discover the nuance of the world’s languages, shall we?

This week’s word is bricoleur. A French word meaning ‘a person who constructs things by randomly messing around without following an explicit plan’. So, are you the kind of person at work who creates a detailed plan for each project, and then you follow it step by step? Or are you a bricoleur? 

Maybe you bandy around ideas until some sort of order starts to emerge. Or maybe you work with many materials or tools until the ‘right’ one makes its appearance. And while your analytically minded colleagues might tease you, you’re capable of “thinking by the seat of your pants”. You have the advantage of improvisation.

French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss would use bricoleur as a mark of pride. Because it’s not fully random or just messing around. A bricoleur is, in a sense, an intuitive technician who plays with concepts and objects, in order to learn about them. How best to learn how a computer functions, than by taking it apart and tinkering, right?

Humans evolve due to innovation and inspiration. Bricoleur are natural innovators at work. Perhaps we are all bricoleur as we learn new things. So, the next time someone smirks at your messy desk or your disorganized kitchen, just smile back and thank them! 

Here’s to this week… May you all endeavor to adopt this Word of the Week and see the world a little bit differently. I’ll be back next week with a new word. Thank you for listening!