For those of you who don't get tsuwm's worthless word for the day, today's word is bricoleur, the definition for which he gives as:

[F, handy-man] someone who continually invents his own strategies for comprehending reality

"Joe had that authentic air of the solitary bricoleur, the potterer of genius, like the Facteur Cheval..."
- Michael Chabon, _Kavalier & Clay_

As I'm sure the worthy tsuwmster is well aware, this term also appears in Rheingold's excellent book They Have a Word For It. I don't have the book at hand, but I recall the meaning as being a little different from this, or at least having another sense in addition to this one. The sense given here seems to derive from Levi-Strauss's adoption of the term in the field of semiotics, to mean someone who doesn't have a set of theories about the world in order to help understand it, but rather patches together an understanding in a very ad hoc way.

I am fond of the other sense I understand the word to be used in, which is very much related to the one given but that is a bit more concrete, or hands-on. If I recall correctly, a bricoleur is also someone who is adept at responding to a physical task (such as fixing something around the house) with whatever is at hand - using string, a nine-penny nail, and a turkey baster to fix the furnace, say. Googling a bit turned up the following:

'Bricoleur' is a French term meaning, roughly, 'handyman.' A bricoleur is adept at finding, or simply recognizing in their environment, resources that can be used to build something they believe is important and then combining these resources in a way that achieves their goals.

Unlike the engineer, who has some idea of "theoretical principles" which underly a given "practical implementation", the bricoleur has a set of techniques from which they pick and choose the appropriate "tool" to be used in the situation at hand. It is not necessary to understand _why_ something works, only that it _does_ work.

Clearly, the two senses are very closely related, but one focuses on comprehension of reality, where the other relates to skillfully interacting with and manipulating things in physical reality.

Just wondering if I'm comprehending reality at all correctly in attributing this second, more concrete sense to the word. I think the Chabon quote bears out my take on it pretty well, describing a bricoleur as a "potterer."

It was also interesting to note in googling the word that, in addition to being used in French and English, it's been adopted for use in German as well - about a third of the google results were in German.