What is "drudgery"

Usage examples of "drudgery".

What young fellow, receiving an allowance of three hundred a year, would have submitted to the drudgery of a cadetship for fourteen months?

The diner seats himself, fixes a pipe to the spigot in his cheek, so that he may drink continously as he dines, so avoiding the drudgery of opening flasks, pouring out mugs or goblets, raising, tilting and setting down the mug or goblet, with the consequent danger of breakage or waste.

I realized why my father and uncle and most other journeyers let their beards grow, for to shave each day in such conditions is a painful drudgery.

This after all was a probationary assignment, and the supervisor had the power to send Ronny Bronston back to the drudgery of his office job at Population Statistics.

To watch him, you would never have dreamed that Herbert Minks had ever contemplated City life, much less known ten years of drudgery in its least poetic stages.

If the accounts of Rackham Perfumeries are cruel drudgery for a man of his temperament, what must this girl, barely past adolescence, brimful of life and promise, be suffering as she scribbles?

He was in a mood to cherish warmly the funny, cold little culture that the street represented, the narrow unamiable culture with its taboos against mentioned reality, its elaborate suppression of sex, its insistence on a stoical ability to withstand a monotonous routine of business or drudgery -- and in the midst, performing the necessary rituals to keep dead ideas alive, like a college of witch-doctors in their stern stone tents, powerful, property-owning Hempnell.

A certain amount of daily domestic drudgery and unexciting intercourse with simple-minded people will be the best thing in the world for that brain of hers, always simmering with some new project in its least fervid condition.

Those papers that do make it into print are months old and accessing them involves the physical drudgery of moving around in the library, unshelving and reshelving volumes of old journals, and sometimes travelling to other libraries or waiting for them to make and send you copies.

It is best for him to know, that, in order to be a happy man, he must always be a laborer, with the mind or the body, or with both: and that the reasonable exertion of his powers, bodily and mental, is not to be regarded as mere drudgery, but as a good discipline, a wise ordination, a training in this primary school of our being, for nobler endeavors, and spheres of higher activity hereafter.

It was his conviction that the United States was becoming part of the Third World and that their grandchildren would inhabit a mildly poisoned earth and endure lives of back-breaking drudgery under an increasingly Orwellian government.

Only the elitebureaucrats, military, higher echelons of police and overlapping internal intelligence departments, valued people sequestered away in certain government research projects such as Gamebird, or a very few otherswere allowed to lead lives of anything save endless drudgery, malnourishment if not outright starvation, hopelessness, and unceasing terror.

When I consider the narrow limitations of the Pilgrim households, the absence of luxury, the presence of danger and hardship, the harsh laws--only less severe than the contemporary laws of England and Virginia--the weary drudgery, the few pleasures, the curb upon the expression of emotion and of tenderness, the ascetic repression of worldly thought, the absence of poetry in the routine occupations and conditions, I can feel what the Bible must have been to them.

There were at least half a dozen apprentices in sight, all of them busy shoveling sand, mixing and grinding pigments, hammering boards together into a platform, sweating and sending up a haze of dust from all the drudgery that lies behind serene fine art in metal and stone and paint.

Even the tourist art was not all drudgery, because I learnt that working with representational paintings required a discipline of line, subject and brushwork that only increased the intensity of the tactile art I went to afterwards and which no one saw.