“I’ll break it for him,” said I, now flying into a passion again at this unaccountable farrago of the landlord’s. “May be not,” taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, “but I rayther guess you’ll be done brown if that ere harpooneer hears you a slanderin’ his head.” “I tell you what it is, landlord,” said I quite calmly, “you’d better stop spinning that yarn to me-I’m not green.” Today, we often use it for a jumble or mishmash of disorganized, haphazard, or even nonsensical ideas. In Latin, farrago meant “cattle fodder,” but it was also used more generally to mean “mixture.” That’s the meaning that farrago carried into English.

Farrago is derived from the Latin far, for spelt. The narrator of Moby-Dick (let’s call him Ishmael) uses it to describe the Spouter-Inn landlord’s cryptic responses to questions about his (Ishmael’s) potential bedfellow for the night. To wit: gallimaufry, salmagundi, ragout, gumbo, and olio, etc. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 71 - The Jeroboam's Storyĭefinition - a confused mixture or hodgepodgeĪs far as synonyms for clutter go, farrago is but one of many. According to this account and what was subsequently learned, it seemed that the scaramouch in question had gained a wonderful ascendency over almost everybody in the Jeroboam. Stubb here alluded to a strange story told of the Jeroboam, and a certain man among her crew, some time previous when the Pequod spoke the Town-Ho. Scaramouch doesn’t get used a lot these days–not enough commedia dell’arte stans out there, we suppose–but our research did turn up a letter to the editor of The Toronto Sun from 1988 whose author referred to a certain politician and diplomat as “a scaramouch and a master of political expediency.” Ouch. Similar to how a more recent comedic character name, Debbie Downer from Saturday Night Live, has become generalized in the language, Scaramouch became scaramouch, one sense of which is, appropriately “a cowardly buffoon,” and a second, “a rascal or scamp,” which seems to be the sense Melville used in Stubb’s description of a cunning huckster who called himself the archangel Gabriel. Capitalized, Scaramouch refers to a stock character from Italy’s commedia dell’arte who was typically both boastful and cowardly.

Farrago stream deck