yak shaving
English
Etymology
Coined by Carlin Vieri in his time at the MIT AI Lab (1993–1998)[1] after viewing a segment at the end of "The Boy Who Cried Rat!" (1991), the sixth episode of the first season of The Ren and Stimpy Show.[2] The segment featured "Yak Shaving Day", a Christmas-like holiday where participants watch for the shaven yak to float by in his enchanted canoe.
Pronunciation
Audio (US): (file)
Noun
- Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing one to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows one to solve a larger problem.
- I was doing a bit of yak shaving this morning, and it looks like it might have paid off.
- A less useful activity done consciously or subconsciously to procrastinate about a larger but more useful task.
- I looked at a reference manual for my car just to answer one question, but I spent the whole afternoon with my nose buried in it, just yak shaving, and got no work done on the car itself.
- For quotations using this term, see Citations:yak shaving.
See also
- bikeshedding
- when you're up to your neck in alligators, it's hard to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp
References
- ^ Brown, Jeremy (11 February 2000), “Yak Shaving”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name)[1], MIT, archived from the original on 12 January 2021
- ^ Vincent Waller, John Kricfalusi (8 September 1991), “The Boy Who Cried Rat!”, in The Ren & Stimpy Show, season 1, episode 3b/6