Bike-Shedding

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Martha, for one of the projects I’ve been working on lately, we’ve been using a term called bike shedding. Do you know this?

Bike shedding? Is that getting rid of your bike and moving up to a motorcycle or down to a tricycle?

No, no, no. It dates back to 1961 in a book called Parkinson’s Law by a fellow by the name of C. Northcote Parkinson.

And he describes about people’s willingness to argue about the tiny details of a project because those details are knowable and manageable and their unwillingness to talk about the large picture, the big bones of the project.

So, for example, as he illustrates, you might easily argue about the color of a bicycle shed.

Should you paint it red?

Should you paint it yellow?

What color?

But you would be unlikely to argue about how to build an atomic power plant because that’s outside your expertise or your experience, right?

I see.

And he describes this in a pretty funny, humorous context of a way of envisioning how a project or management can go wrong where you get lost in the details.

You spend way too much time arguing about stuff that really doesn’t matter simply because that’s the only thing that you can get a handle on.

And when I think about – sometimes when I think about language, I actually think about the same thing.

Sometimes we argue about the very useless little tidbits rather than talking in general about the big picture of the world of linguistics.

Right. That’s a really good point.

Bike shedding, I like that.

Bike shedding, yeah.

Well, I have a really old word for you.

You’ve given me a new one.

Here’s a really old word.

Tohu bohu.

Do you know this word, Grant?

Tohu bohu.

I love this word.

T-O-H-U-B-O-H-U.

Tohu bohu.

It means just a mess, confusion.

I walked into my teenage son’s room, and it was a tohu bohu.

But here’s the really great thing about this word, Grant.

It is so old because it goes back to Hebrew scripture.

In fact, it goes all the way back to the beginning.

In Genesis, when it talks about the earth being without form and void, the Hebrew there is tohu vavohu, without form and void.

And ever since the 1700s, people have been using tohu vavohu, not very often, but to mean a mess, confusion, disorder.

That’s brand new to me, even though it’s very old to the language, tohu vavohu.

Isn’t that great?

Tohubohu and bike shedding.

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