What is “charette”?
Feverish activity immediately preceding a deadline. The term comes from the French name for the horsedrawn carts in Paris that carried architectural students with their architectural models from their workshops to their examinations, still feverishly finishing the models “en charette.” In the vernacular English we can speak of “having a charette” and, of course, there is a verb form: “charetting it up.” Without a deadline there can be no charette. (Aside: Charette is also the name of a big art store in the Boston area.) Use in a sentence: Rohit can work only en charette. • What is a “gyroscope”? gy-ro-scope ^–re-,sko^-p, Brit n [F] (1856) :a wheel or disk mounted to spin rapidly about an axis and also free to rotate about one or both of two axes perpendicular to each other and to the axis of spin so that a rotation of one of the two mutually perpendicular axes results from application of torque to the other when the wheel is spinning and so that the entire apparatus offers considerabl
