Military Charrette

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mike Fitzgerald from Madison, Alabama.

Hi, Mike. Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Well, I have been in the Army for a long time. I retired a few years ago,

And I’m still supporting the Army. And a term came up recently. I’m like, what is this?

But the word is charrette. And usually it sounds like it’s some sort of event or some sort of

Planning type of thing. But I was like, what is what does this actually mean?

Charrette. So how would you use it in a sentence?

Usually it’s like we need to do a charrette on this topic or for this operation.

I received an email recently where they referred to it as a design charrette.

That’s a good clue.

Design charrette is a very good clue.

And does it happen outside of something that’s designy or creative like that?

I’m not really certain.

I just know that as different events are being planned, sometimes this term gets thrown out there.

You know, I think sometimes what happens in the military, different leaders will start using terminology and, you know, their staffs and whatnot kind of just pick up on the term and start using it.

I don’t know if they’re using it correctly or not, but it definitely caught my attention.

Yeah, I can see why that would catch your attention because it’s, I wouldn’t call it alien to the Army, but it definitely came from outside the Army.

It comes in this case from architecture.

And that’s why the word design caught my ear.

Because if we can work backward from it, in modern architecture, it’s about an intense period of work where students might finish their projects before deadline.

Or even an architectural event where stakeholders or just a bunch of people who are involved in a project

Get together to workshop all of the different things they need to resolve

And solve all the outstanding issues so that they can move on to the next stage in the project.

And so Charette can be either one of those.

So as I look back at the most recent email that I see that,

That’s actually kind of the tone of it, that they’re trying to work through workarounds and exhaust all opportunities.

So that’s really interesting.

Yeah, but it’s even more interesting than that.

If we can dig a little bit into the history of the word charrette, before it came into English, it meant little cart.

And it came about probably because of these little carts with four wheels that architects would haul their architectural plans around on.

So if you imagine these large rolled up drawings that can be kind of unwieldy.

And if you have a lot of them, you can’t really carry them in your arms.

You need some kind of cart.

And there was an expression by 1870 in French,

Ce met en charrette, which meant to put yourself in a cart,

Meaning to rush around to finish your work.

It was used by architectural students.

And charrette itself is one of many words we have in English and in French,

Which come from a Latin word, carus, C-A-R-R-U-S,

Which meant car, but not car in the modern automobile sense,

But car is a thing, a vehicle used for transporting other things.

And then we get words like car and chariot and what else?

Marth, carriage and carriageway all come from this word.

Neat.

The military in general has so many terms and acronyms that get used that I figured it just kind of fell into that category.

But, yeah, it’s really neat that it’s got a lot more behind it.

Yeah, Mike, I suspect a lot of times the words that come into the Army,

You know, as somebody like you who’s worked in the military for a long time,

You’ve probably seen this before.

A lot of the words that come into the military come from the private contractors.

So they’ll come from outside the military,

From companies that are doing business with the military.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what happened here.

That’s great.

You know, I think it’s, you know, finding out the origins of words

And especially your show has been really enlightening for me and my family.

So we really appreciate what you do, and thank you for taking my call.

That’s our pleasure. Take care.

Okay, thank you.

Bye-bye.

We love those words from the workplace, those things that come up on your job.

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