PASTICHE

pastiche

/pass-TEESH/

DEFINITION

noun

EXAMPLES

The director's new murder mystery is a clever pastiche of the 1950s noir

films he watched as a boy.

"Chicano art is a pastiche of post-Mexican Revolution art blended with

current-day social and political activism that borrows from the likes of Diego

Rivera and the gritty, West Coast street art scene." — From a review by Kyle

Roerink in the Billings Gazette (Montana), September 3, 2013

DID YOU KNOW?

It all began with macaroni. Our word "pastiche" is from French, but the

French word was in turn borrowed from Italian, where the word is "pasticcio."

 "Pasticcio" is what the Italians called a kind of "macaroni pie" (from the word "pasta").

 English-speakers familiar with this multilayered dish had begun to apply the name

to various sorts of potpourris or hodgepodges (musical, literary, or otherwise) by the

18th century. For over a hundred years English speakers were happy with "pasticcio,"

 until we discovered the French word "pastiche" sometime in the latter part of the 1800s.

Although we still occasionally use "pasticcio" in its extended meaning, "pastiche" is

now much more common.