Monday, September 11, 2006

Learned a new word today!

Learned a new word today. "charrette" And thanks to Wikipedia have discovered a bit about it.

a final, intensive effort to finish a project (usually architectural) before a deadline.

i.e. we convened a charrette today.

Thought to originate from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 19th Century, the word charrette, French for "cart" or "chariot," refers to the cart pushed around by professors to collect the final artwork by art and architecture students, who often rushed frantically to finish their work.
The term charrette also, historically, applied to the cart or tumbril used to carry the condemned to the guillotine. See: Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé. For example: Une charrette (...) traînait lentement à la guillotine un homme dont personne ne savait le nom (Anatole France, Les Dieux ont soif, 1912, p. 44) [trans: "a charrette slowly brought to the guillotine a man whose name nobody knew".]
Hence the current meaning of work leading up to a deadline, subsequently morphed into the urban-planning usage of the term.

Teaser question for the day. What musical currently has more productions playing than any other?

Abba Dabba Do! It's Mamma Mia! There are currently 11 productions
running around the world (9 resident productions and 2 tours). With three productions playing in North America alone, the musical has more productions playing around the world than any other current Broadway musical and can be experienced in six different languages globally (English, Swedish, Spanish, German, Japanese and Korean). Courtesy of Allan Bird's Broadway Review.

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