Perhaps a further change is taking place, but we will have to wait a few years to be sure either way. The figurative sense seems to have come in almost immediately and has been dominant ever since. However, few people seem to have ever used farrago in English to mean a literal mixture and that sense is long defunct. So farrago is actually a close relative of farina, the breakfast cereal. This was taken from far, the name the Romans had for a type of wheat that we now call spelt, much cultivated at the time in Southern Europe. Its origin was the Latin word spelled the same way, which meant mixed fodder for cattle. It was at first applied to mixtures of things, such as a dish of food (so it was close in meaning to salmagundi), and also to mixed races of people. This is only a few years after farrago appeared in the language in its original literal sense. It looks very much as though people are confusing it with fiasco or furore, and through that confusion creating a new deprecatory sense for the word.īut then, farrago has been a negative word right from its first recorded appearance, in the middle of the seventeenth century in John Row’s Historie of the Kirk of Scotland: “A strange miscellanie, farrago, and hotch-potch of Poperie, Arminianisme, and what not”. The Oxford English Dictionary has on file an example from as long ago as 1989 that looks as though it is going that way - David Kalstone wrote in Becoming A Poet: “Recalling the ‘farrago’ years later, Bishop said that she never again sent Moore any of her poems for suggestions or approval”. It’s hard to be sure from the evidence, but there are indications that people are sometimes using farrago to mean a lot of noise and argument about nothing very much, or some happening or event which has gone disastrously wrong. To judge from the company it keeps, it is much favoured by judges and journalists but by hardly anybody else. The word, I suspect, has no meaning for most people apart from negative associations in such set phrases. It was also used more generally to mean 'mixture.' When it was adopted into English in the early 1600s, farrago retained the 'mixture' sense of its ancestor. Send us feedback about these examples.When the London Daily Mirror reported a British television personality as saying “It was terribly bad timing after the farrago of the chocolate bar wedding photo” (don’t ask), or when a writer recently said in the Washington Post that a film shoot “was a famous farrago of disaster”, one begins to wonder whether a new sense of the word is developing.įarrago, in its more usual sense of a confused mixture, turns up so often in phrases of condemnation like “a farrago of excuses and obfuscation”, “a farrago of deceit and lies”, or “a rambling farrago of half-digested knowledge”, that it has become one of those all-purpose dismissive words that ought to appear in public only when attached to a health warning. 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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