Tedium
|
Descriptive of any activity which, when you stand back and look at it, serves no substantive purpose, however emollient it may feel from a formal perspective. If you have shaken your head and asked yourself is there really no better way to do this? then you have looked into the tedial abyss. Careful, lest it looks back into you.
A short, tedious history.
Merriam Webster is amusing on the etymology:
- Words frequently change their meanings, and some even will go from meaning one thing to meaning something almost opposite (such as “nice”, which in its earliest use meant “lewd, wanton, dissolute”). Tedious is not one of these words; its meanings may have shifted over the centuries, but they have always had something to do with irksome, boring, or overlong things. The word comes from the Latin taedēre, meaning “to disgust or weary.” Tedious has been in use since the 15th century and has been included in hundreds of dictionaries, although perhaps none have rendered so poetic and succinct a definition as Nathaniel Bailey’s entry in his 1756 New Universal Etymological English Dictionary: “Wearisome by continuance.”
The third law of worker entropy
Hypothesis: all other things being equal, if an activity is tedious, it is wasteful. If it is wasteful, you shouldn’t do it. This can be articulated as the Jolly Contrarian’s third law of worker entropy:
There is a 100% correlation between (i) activities that, however important they might seem, in fact have no value, and (ii) activities which are tedious.
If an activity is 25% tedious it is 25% wasteful.
Tedium and interest
I can’t prove this, but tedium is not the opposite of “interesting”. There is an intermediate purgatorial state which is not particularly interesting in any meaningful sense of the word, but is not especially tedious either. Bruce Springsteen’s album Nebraska, for example.