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Tedium: Difference between revisions
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Descriptive of any activity which, when you stand back and look at it, serves no [[Substance|substantive]] purpose, however emollient it may feel from a [[form]]al 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. [[Abyss|Careful, lest it looks back into you]]. | |||
This can be articulated as the Jolly Contrarian’s [[third law of worker entropy]]: | ===A short, tedious history.=== | ||
[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tedious Merriam Webster] is amusing on the etymology: | |||
{{box|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 ''[[waste]]ful''. 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]].'' | ''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]].'' | ||