Bagatelle
Meaning:
The noun has two meanings- a board game with small balls that you try to hit into holes; and, a small or unimportant thing or amount. It probably developed from the table made with raised sides for trou madame, which was also played with ivory balls and continued to be popular into the later 19th century, after which it developed into bar billiards, with influences from the French/Belgian game billard russe (with supposed Russian origins). A bagatelle variant using fixed metal pins, billard japonais, eventually led to the development of pachinko and pinball. Bagatelle is also laterally related to miniature golf.
Origin:
As a game, bagatelle traces its origins to the early 19th Century. As an unimportant thing, the word finds its origins in the mid 17th Century, from French, from Italian bagatella, where baga means baggage, or from Latin baca, meaning ‘berry’. Table games involving sticks and balls evolved from efforts to bring outdoor games like ground billiards, croquet, and bowling inside for play during inclement weather. They are attested in general by the 15th century, although the 19th-century idea that bagatelle itself derived from the English “shovel-board” described in Charles Cotton’s 1674 Compleat Gamester has since been disregarded.
Usage:
That orange candy cost a mere bagatelle.
The question of who will pick up the coffee is a mere bagatelle in the overall planning of the conference
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