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OLIO (OH-lee-oh)

1. English name for a Spanish stew known as Olla podrida
2. A miscellaneous mixture of elements, especially artistic works
Common
clues: Mixture; Hodgepodge; Stew; Miscellany; Pastiche; Mishmash; Mixed bag; Potpourri; Medley; This and that; Melange; Spicy stew; Salmagundi
Related crosswordese:
Olla
Crossword puzzle frequency
: 9 times a year
Video:
Ljubljana, Slovenia: Happy Hodgepodge



A pastiche of comic strip imagery from 1930-2000. [Courtesy: Michael Delahunt]


A work is called pastiche if it was cobbled together in imitation of several original works. As the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, a pastiche in this sense is "a medley of various ingredients; a hotchpotch, farrago, jumble." This meaning accords with etymology: pastiche is the French version of Italian pasticcio, which designated a kind of pie made of many different ingredients.


In the 18th century, opera pasticcios were frequently made by composers as notable as George Frideric Handel, Christoph Willibald Gluck, and Johann Christian Bach. These composite works would take various portions of scores by other composers and recombine them, changing words and adapting freely.



This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Pastiche".