Word: tedium
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...airtight bubble of Harvard Square, someone from section is sipping tea at the next table or a friend is in the adjoining fitting room even when you aren't on Harvard property proper. So the summer is for breaking out. Three peaceful months of respite from the tedium of continual human interaction and from an active gossip mill (one that keeps churning despite the scarcity of worthwhile grist...
...will the current blip on the sales charts really endure? Zomnir hopes so. "The whole earring thing was considered wild and crazy 10 years ago. Now it's common," she says. But she concedes that men are "not big on maintenance"--we're talking tedium: a trim, a filing, cuticle removal, and then a base coat, two primary coats and a top clear coat, each and every week. On the other hand, she says, "guys can get away with chipped nails more than women...
...Journal also noted that computers like Deep Blue can invent new drugs by "sorting quickly through hundreds of chemical combinations that once required months of human tedium." Well, as some toll takers might observe, one human's tedium is another human's job. And although automating the tedious does raise average wages over time, it can lower wages for people with obsolete skills...
...result is a remarkable 137-page account of the tedium, trials and travails--and sometimes even joys--of the locked-in life. Bemoaning his fruitless "physical rehabilitation" sessions, for example, Bauby writes, "I would be the happiest man in the world if I could just properly swallow the saliva that permanently invades my mouth." He lets his readers know that his celebrated wit survived the stroke by pointing up the ironic aspects of his condition. Bauby recalls a contract he signed before his illness to write an updated version of the Alexandre Dumas classic The Count of Monte Cristo...
Cavanaugh says she and her husband, Philip Gschwend, a professor of environmental organic chemistry at MIT, joke about winning the lottery so they could avoid the tedium of writing research grant proposals...