bikeshedding
Futile expenditure of time and energy in discussion of marginal technical issuesFutile expenditure of time and energy in discussion of marginal technical issues.
Meaning
2 senses(uncountable)Futile expenditure of time and energy in discussion of marginal technical issues.
(uncountable)Procrastination.
Origin
From bikeshed + -ing. The term was coined as a metaphor to illuminate Parkinson's Law of TFrom bikeshed + -ing. The term was coined as a metaphor to illuminate Parkinson's Law of Triviality. Parkinson observed that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult to criticize constructively. It was popularized in the Berkeley Software Distribution community by Poul-Henning Kamp and has spread from there to the software industry at large.
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Lessons for this word
1 lessons- A1Countable and uncountable nouns — Because it can be uncountable