A.Word.A.Day --farce

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Mar 17, 2025

This week’s theme
Food words used metaphorically

This week’s words
farce
jammy

Farce Actors Dancing

Art: Pieter Jansz. Quast (1605-1647)

Previous week’s theme
Five-letter words

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

It’s said that you are what you eat, but these days perhaps you’re also what you tweet. Or stream. Or binge. Just as you might regret indulging in dubious street food, you may later regret swallowing those half-baked WhatsApp forwards and other artificially flavored postings whipped up by paid operatives.

Just as a bad diet can lead to health problems, consuming harmful media can pollute our understanding of the world.

As an antidote, we’ll serve up five delectable words with food-related etymology (literally, true story). Enjoy these words from the culinary world that have simmered their way into everyday language. Each one is a tasty metaphor ready for use beyond the kitchen.

farce

PRONUNCIATION:

(fars)

MEANING:

noun:	1. A light play, film, or literary work involving absurd, exaggerated, or improbable situations.
	2. Humor of this type.
	3. An absurd or ridiculous situation; mockery.
	4. A mix of finely chopped ingredients used as stuffing.
verb tr.:	1. To pad a speech or written work with jokes or witty remarks.
	2. To stuff or fill with culinary mixture.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Old French farce (stuffing, interlude), from Latin farsa, feminine of Latin farsus, from farcire (to stuff). Earliest documented use: 1390.

NOTES:

Originally the term referred to forcemeat (also known as farcemeat), a culinary mixture used as stuffing. The term later extended metaphorically to comic interludes actors inserted (“stuffed”) into religious plays, eventually leading to its modern comedic meaning.

USAGE:

“Election night [in autocracies] is a lifeless tableau of power, often with a hint of farce in the naked ballot-stuffing and inflated tallies.”
The Drama of Democracy; The Economist (London, UK); Jul 13, 2024.

See more usage examples of farce in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. -Penelope Lively, writer (b. 17 Mar 1933)

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