My first foray [ˈfɔrˌeɪ] into Marie Kondo’s efficient way of living began when I bought an incredibly messy former roommate her breakout book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up a few years ago. (It’s safe to say that neither of us ended up reading it, and the book got lost within his ‘stuff’ pile.)

foray
noun [ˈfɔrˌeɪ]

A foray is an initial and often tentative attempt to do something in a new or different area of activity, as in “the novelist’s foray into nonfiction.” In martial contexts, foray means “a sudden or irregular invasion or attack for war or spoils.”

likely ancestor of foray is an Anglo-French word referring to the violent sort who do invasion forays, but that word could also refer to a forager—that is, one who wanders in search of food. (Forage has the same etymological

English