Being bored is relatively new

I LIKE FOOD AND I'M BORED

This statement is plastered front and centre on my home page, so how could I resist when I read in the AFR today that the words 'boring' and 'interesting' did not exist in English until the 1800s? Surely that can't be true I thought, so I investigated.

As always there seems to be a slight divergence of opinion, but generally speaking people seem to think that Charles Dickens first coined the word 'boredom' in Bleak House in 1852. Of course someone disagreed, but he only pushed it back by a few years. 'To bore' and 'a bore' seem to have been used in the 18th century, but wherever I looked, nobody seemed to think that any of the variations on a theme of boredom, including boring, existed before then. I really am not going to go into the ins and outs of this. But you could look at Language Log which is a bit pedantic (dare I say boring?) or the much more interesting article from the Smithsonian.com. They will give you the facts such as they are, as well as a partial analysis of boredom itself and its links with depression (they don't really know).

But really - boredom is an emotional state - as one of these articles says, and so must surely have existed since people walked this earth. Well maybe not prehistoric man who probably didn't have time to be bored - he was too busy keeping himself alive. Although even then one can imagine doing the same few things over and over again, day after day, must have been just a tiny bit boring. And indeed these articles refer to ancient Greeks and Romans regarding boredom as a sickness and they had words for it. But not boredom, boring, bore. And of course, this is perhaps where the whole thing gets complicated because the Greeks didn't speak English - and neither did the French - who call it 'ennui' - always slightly different it seems to me. Anyway different languages, different meanings, maybe different histories. Maybe the French got bored before the English. The latin word was taedia - which, now that I see it and think about it is the original for our word 'tedium' I suppose. Maybe tedium was the precursor of boredom.

Back to the English though. (Sorry - but I am basically English.) Maybe the poor, the peasants had no concept of boredom, as they too must have just been too busy keeping alive. But all those aristocrats wafting around with not a lot to do, must surely have been bored from time to time. So how did they describe this state?

Coincidentally, on the same page in the AFR there was another book review - this time a biography of Thomas Gainsborough, painter of portraits of seventeenth century rich people. Here is one of them - a rather bored looking young lady. She's been told to pose but really she would rather be somewhere else. They must have talked about how they felt, so how did they do it if they didn't have the word 'bored'? It's used so often these days by teenagers, and even younger children amongst whom it's almost a badge of honour.

It's a mystery to me.

And that's really all I have to say on this subject. Well maybe I should say that I do hope that I am not too boring, either today or any other day. For this blog is really rather self-indulgent, springing as it did from my own boredom. I will end though, with a quote from the Smithsonian article, which was inspired by the Boring Conference, set up by one James Ward of London. I think it sort of says what I try to do these days, when I am looking for inspiration. Boring can be creative.

"the Boring Conference wants people to use the mundane as an impetus to creative thinking and observation. It’s not the most amazing idea in the world, but I think it’s a nice idea – to look around, notice things, I guess that’s the message: Look at stuff.” James Ward

POSTSCRIPT : My sister has commented (see below) that when she is bored she eats. And that is a very good point, particularly seeing that this is supposed to be all about food. For I think she is probably not the only one. Indeed it may well account for some of the obesity that we see all around. I suspect that even though, theoretically there are so many more things to do to relieve boredom these days, that, in fact, lots of people are bored - in some circles it may even be almost fashionable - and that is when they eat and drink - in front of a screen.