| The editors of The Last Redoubt recommend only the finest books to their readers. | |
 
|
|
| In this classic work of distant future horror, all humanity finds bleak refuge from an utterly hostile Universe in a mountain-dwarfing pyramid called 'The Last Redoubt.' | |
Words have two uses: to communicate with others, and to contemplate within ourselves. People do not require words to think. Anybody who has experienced "tip of the tongue", also known as "Presque vu", knows that one can possess a thought without possessing the word for the thought. Nevertheless, most people rely upon language to provide structure to their thoughts at least to some degree. This can lead to frustration or be detrimental when the concept that they are trying to enunciate, whether within themselves or to others, can not be well represented within their vocabulary or within the grammatical structure of the languages they speak.
For this reason, I am publishing a series of words that I have invented. These words represent ideas that are not easily expressed in the common English vocabulary, and yet are useful concepts that I feel individuals and society will benefit from being able to communicate or contemplate efficiently.
Grelay (grey - ley)I initially invented the word "grelay" just to refer to the traffic condition. The state of the light being green but nobody moving happens in traffic because each car must wait for the car ahead of it to start moving before it can start moving in turn. Thus, although each driver's reaction time might only be a second, these seconds accumulate because they must transpire in series instead of in parallel. Once I began thinking of that mechanism, I came to realize that we experience grelay in many circumstances, not just traffic. Consider the task of getting a new certified copy of one's birth-certificate. One must acquire and fill-out the proper forms. One must mail them to the appropriate county-records office. One must then wait for that office to process the request, and then wait for the birth certificate to be mailed back. Any one of those steps might have a small delay associated with it, but because they each delay the initiation of all the subsequent steps the total delay can accumulate and become dramatic. Delays can be costly even to the point of jeopardizing or exceeding the value of the delayed activity. I recently had to get a copy of my birth certificate; the bureaucratic grelay caused it to take over a year! Inventing the word grelay is a contribution because it sensitizes us to situations where individual delays can accumulate. If people as a whole are more aware of this phenomenon, it may encourage them to design systems in our civilization (whether they be computer systems, traffic systems, commerce systems, or bureaucratic systems) that are less susceptible to this failure mode.
Noun -
1. A significant delay experienced as the result of the accumulation of many individual potentially insignificant delays; an aggregate delay.
2. The period of time during which all or part of a lane of automobile traffic is not moving despite the fact that the controlling traffic signal has turned green.
Usage: "The process of approving invoices is subject to a lot of grelay."
Origin: The first three letters of the word "green" added to the last three letters of the word "delay". It also bears similarity to a compound word of aggregate delay.
Discuss this article on reddit.
| Copyright ©2009 The Last Redoubt |