beadledom

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English

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Etymology

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From beadle +‎ -dom.

Noun

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beadledom (countable and uncountable, plural beadledoms)

  1. Beadles collectively, and their characteristics as a class.
  2. Stupid or senseless officiousness.

Quotations

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  • 1955, William Gaddis, The Recognitions, page 320
    But there was more to it than gross tyranny of business enterprise; and advertising, whose open chancres gaped everywhere, only a symptom of the great disease, this plague of newness, this febrile, finally paretic seizure dictated by a beadledom of time monitored by clocks, observatories, signals on the radio, the recorded voice of a woman (dead or alive) who dissected the latest minute on the telephone when you dialed NERVOUS.