Meaning
Work that can never be finished - every advance undone, every completion immediately needing to be begun again. The phrase is for treadmill labours: the boulder reaches near the top and rolls back down, forever. Learned but common; the capital S survives from the king's name, and the word pairs naturally with task, labour, struggle, and battle. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
Sisyphus, the legendary founder-king of Corinth, was too clever by half: he betrayed Zeus's abduction of Aegina to her father Asopus for a spring, then cheated death twice - chaining Thanatos himself so no one could die, and persuading Persephone to let him return to scold a wife who had, on his own instructions, left his corpse unburied. Hades answered with the boulder, and Homer, calling him the craftiest of men, put him in the Iliad and the Odyssey alike; Ovid's Orpheus moved him to sit down for the only time on record. Lucretius saw him as the politician endlessly defeated in the quest for power, a 1649 emblem book made him the senseless war continued, and Albert Camus's essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) made him the absurd hero of the modern age - one must imagine Sisyphus happy, since the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. English has the adjective in place by 1906, when Mary Higgs's Glimpses into the Abyss noted 'It seemed a Sisyphean task, no sooner ended than a new one was exacted'.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a Sisyphean effort
- like Sisyphus
- Sisyphean labour
Usage Examples
- Keeping the canal clear of water hyacinth is a Sisyphean task; the weed regrows faster than the cutters work.
- Moderating the comments felt Sisyphean - every thousand removed revealed two thousand more.
- Software maintenance is Sisyphean by nature: finish the backlog today, and tomorrow's bugs refill it.