{"id":14116,"date":"2012-07-04T15:51:20","date_gmt":"2012-07-04T22:51:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/neology\/2012\/07\/04\/desenrascanco.html"},"modified":"2012-07-04T15:51:20","modified_gmt":"2012-07-04T22:51:20","slug":"desenrascanco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2012\/07\/04\/desenrascanco\/","title":{"rendered":"desenrascanço"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Desenrascanço is a Portuguese word more or less meaning “disentanglement,” used to refer to improvising solutions, or, as one web page<\/a> puts it, “an ability to solve a problem without having the knowledge or the adequate tools to do so, by use of imaginative resources or by applying knowledge to new situations [...] resulting in a [...] good-enough solution.”<\/p>\n

I gather that “hack” or “kludge” might be quasi-synonyms, except that I most commonly hear those used with negative connotations, whereas desenrascanço apparently has positive connotations.<\/p>\n

A friend of mine once lived in an apartment where a lot of things didn't quite work; the people who lived there tended to put together a lot of “makeshift systems” (their phrase, iIrc) to get things working right. If I'm understanding right, that was very much in the spirit of desenrascanço.<\/p>\n

Another web page described desenrascanço in terms of MacGyver, but the TV example that sprang more readily to my mind was Alias<\/cite>. Without ever making a big deal of it, one of Sydney Bristow's great strengths was making use of whatever was available to get herself out of bad situations.<\/p>\n

Yet another web page<\/a> suggests that “This is the word you use when you realized you dropped your keys down a storm drain and pull out an umbrella, a flashlight and a roll of tape and by the magic of desenrascanço, retrieve your keys.”<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Desenrascanço is a Portuguese word more or less meaning “disentanglement,” used to refer to improvising solutions, or, as one web page puts it, “an ability to solve a problem without…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-to-me-words"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}