Why this word is great
MAROTTE — [Noun] A jester's mock scepter, topped with a carved head, or figuratively, a person's peculiar fixation or pet obsession. Its etymology is borrowed from French marotte, a diminutive or pet form of the female personal name Marie, suggesting a doll-like plaything adopted as a fool's emblem. Unlike a "hobby," which suggests scheduled, benign cultivation, or a "principle," which implies a foundational creed, a marotte is a capricious master, governing not by reason but by whimsical devotion. It is the collector's wall of identical thimbles, the scholar's lifetime study of left-handed corkscrews, the daily ritual of tapping a lamppost twice when passing—a private scepterdom that crowns absurdity with solemnity. We are thus both fool and king of our own tiny, senseless domains, wielding small, carved idols to prove the human need to be peculiar, and therefore, to be.