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Apr 8, 2011
This week's themeWords borrowed from French This week's words soubrette beau geste volte-face entrepot gris-gris 
A Senegalese child with gris-gris
Photo: Kari Masson
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with Anu Garggris-gris or grigri or greegree
PRONUNCIATION:
(GREE-gree)
MEANING:
noun:
A charm, amulet, or fetish.
ETYMOLOGY:
From French, of West African origin. Earliest documented use: 1698.
USAGE:
"The marabout [a Muslim holy man] produced a small calculator, punched in
some numbers, and quoted a price of more than a thousand dollars for the
gris-gris. 'With it you can walk across the entire desert and no one will
harm you,' he promised."Peter Gwin; The Telltale Scribes of Timbuktu; National Geographic (Washington, DC); Jan 2011. See more usage examples of gris-gris in Vocabulary.com's dictionary. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
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