Word: tedium
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...Tedium & Hilarity. A less bitter critic than Maugham will not wonder long, after dipping into Classics and Commercials. It has all of Wilson's occasional faults: casual superciliousness, high-brow reserve, lack of warmth. But it also illustrates most of his more important virtues: a literary curiosity that ranges from horror stories and a life of John Barrymore to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and the precious hot-house blooms of Ronald Fir-bank (TIME, Nov. 21, 1949), an oldfashioned, discursive style, an artful way of saying exactly what a writer is up to while explaining...
...playwright who loves darkly the denotation, the connotation, and the sound of his words. "Tedium, tedium. . . tee-de-um, tee-de-um," Gielgud muses, and there can be no doubt about what he means and how he feels. Fry makes exuberant use of images, such as this description of a shooting star; "an excess of phlegm in the solar system coursing toward a heavenly spittoon." As Mendip himself says, "what a wonderful thing is metaphor...
Peaks & Valleys. All Muzak's industrial customers (General Electric, Ford Motor Co., Socony-Vacuum Oil Co., etc.) use it for the same purpose: to ease the tedium of workers performing endlessly repetitive operations. "It keeps me from getting nervous," said an assembler in the Chicago Hallicrafters' plant last week. "And it makes the fellow next to me more cheerful." In Manhattan's Federal Reserve Bank, where 300 girls sort out and count as much as $25 million in paper money every day, the officers have found that Muzak lightens their spirits and lessens their fatigue...
Rusk goes over the tedium and labor of Emerson's lectures with great detail. A reader not familiar with Emerson's writing might get from this book an impression that he was a rather colorless ex-clergyman who lived a good but uneventful life in a dull New England town, and that the chief distinction of his career was that he successfully avoided being monopolized by any person or idea...
Peace Without Practice. Finally, after more than 50 years, Harold Bauer did give it all up. "Peace," he wrote, "is over my soul... I am never going to practice the piano any more . . . Gone [are] the qualms of stage fright . . . the tedium of travel . . the hideous fatigue of submitting to journalistic interviews . . . the resentment against the critics...