yak shaving
English
Etymology
Coined by Carlin Vieri in his time at the MIT AI Lab (1993-8)[1] after viewing[2] a 1991 episode of The Ren and Stimpy Show featuring "Yak Shaving Day," a Christmas-like Holiday where participants hang diapers instead of stockings, stuff rubber boots with coleslaw, and watch for the shaven yak to float by in his enchanted canoe.
Noun
- Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you 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