beadledom

English

Etymology

From beadle +‎ -dom.

Noun

beadledom (countable and uncountable, plural beadledoms)

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

Quotations

• 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.