Sisyphean

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English

WOTD – 15 January 2007
English Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia

Alternative forms

Etymology

From Sisyphus, from Ancient Greek Σίσυφος (Sísuphos). Sisyphus was a Greek mythological figure who was doomed to endlessly roll a boulder up a hill in Hades, only to have it roll back down again.

Pronunciation

  • enPR: sīs'əfēʹən, IPA(key): /ˌsɪsəˈfiːən/
  • Audio (US):(file)

Adjective

Sisyphean (not comparable)

  1. Incessant or incessantly recurring, but futile.
    Synonyms: like herding cats, like painting the Forth Bridge
    Sisyphean task
    Sisyphean labors
    • 1906, Mary Higgs, Glimpses into the Abyss‎:
      Four bucketsful of water—one for each cell—seven for the long passage, two for lavatory and w.c.'s, brasses to clean, paint to dust. It seemed a Sisyphean task, no sooner ended than a new one was exacted.
    • 2013 August 10, “A new prescription”, in The Economist‎, volume 408, number 8848:
      As the world's drug habit shows, governments are failing in their quest to monitor every London window-box and Andean hillside for banned plants. But even that Sisyphean task looks easy next to the fight against synthetic drugs. No sooner has a drug been blacklisted than chemists adjust their recipe and start churning out a subtly different one.
    • 2020 September 7, Adam Ragusea, 0:14 from the start, in How refrigerators work, and how we all ended up with one‎, Macon, archived from the original on 15 September 2024:
      Fact is, this appliance actually contains some heaters in addition to its coolers. That apparent self-defeating contradiction is not a Sisyphean exercise in futility devised as a cruel philosophical joke by nihilistic engineers. It's actually just one of several brilliant pieces of engineering that have made these ubiquitous boxes utterly transformative forces in our lives.
    • 2022 March 8, Lauren Smiley, “‘I’m the Operator’: The Aftermath of a Self-Driving Tragedy”, in Wired‎:
      But whoever does the policing, whether a supervisor or an operator, faces a Sisyphean battle against a well-documented phenomenon: something called automation complacency. When you automate any part of a task, the human overseer starts to trust that the machine has it handled and stops paying attention.
  2. (Greek mythology) Relating to Sisyphus.

Translations

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