Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented and named collage in the early 1900s, playfully producing admixtures of paint, sand, wickerwork, oilcloth, art paper, wallpaper, and/or newspaper to amuse themselves and their viewers. The separate elements retained their separateness while simultaneously merging with the composite whole. According to the author, art‐historical collage is very different from what most writers do when they compose. All essays, when one stops to think about it, are forms of collage, a welding or gluing together of disparate elements, but generally the author's impetus is to make the join‐lines invisible, or at least relatively smooth and unnoticed. The author concludes by stating that collage is the jamming together of dissimilar elements. Everyday life is a rapid succession of collages, with image, music, and text from a multitude of sources, electronic and otherwise, crashing into and over us throughout the day, rarely in smoothly blended configurations.