Shaving Yak Hair

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Greg Rivas from San Antonio.

Hey, Greg, welcome to the show.

How can we help you?

I work in the tech industry. I joined a new team about two years ago, same team I’m with now. And they had this funny term for describing something that was sort of tedious and lengthy. So if they needed to go through code and make a simple change, you know, 10,000 times, they would refer to that as shaving yak hair. And it would be like, oh, I’ve got to shave the yak hair for this thing, and I’m still in the middle of that, and I can’t help you. They kind of say these things, and I had never heard that before. It was just an interesting term phrase.

And you took shaving yak hair to mean, what, fiddling with a lot of small things?

Yes.

So basically they have a large but monotonous workload ahead of them, and it’s shaving yak hair.

Did you Google it?

I have not Googled it.

Okay, because you would have probably been a little confused, because if you Google it, you’re going to come across a television show called Ren and Stimpy. Do you remember Ren and Stimpy?

Yeah, I mean, I absolutely do.

And that’s where the term originated. There was a 1991 segment of the Ren and Stimpy cartoon. Remember these two little weird nut balls? Just the goofiest show you ever wanted to see. I think one of them was a chihuahua. What was the other one?

I don’t remember.

He was a cat.

A cat, yeah. Anyway, in this segment, they have a holiday called Yak Shaving Day where they hang diapers, they shove coleslaw into rubber boots, and they wait for the shaven yak to float by. And it’s ridiculous and hilarious, of course, because the show was somebody’s fever dream. I don’t know what else to say about Riddin’ Stimpy. It was the weirdest thing.

In any case, I guess it caught someone’s fancy. And by 2002, this expression, yak shaving, had really kind of held its place in the tech world to mean a couple different things, not just the way you used it, but to not just mean you doing a lot of small stuff, but also sometimes doing useless stuff instead of what you should be doing. And meaning the small stuff you have to do before you can do the work you want to do or the work that’s really important. So it’s always about kind of stuff getting away of the real thing or the big thing.

But in any case, it did come from that cartoon, Ren and Stimpy, this weird, weird show about shaving a yak. I don’t really know.

That is hilarious.

Yeah, and it wasn’t just that one episode. They also had a video game about yak shaving. It came up more than once, and there’s a song, and it’s really delirious.

Yeah, I think that definitely fits how it seems to be used colloquially here. Everybody seems to use it. For a team of like 40 people, and I had no idea, like, what does this mean?

Well, it’s so evocative. You know, you don’t even need to know the etymology. I mean, it’s really cool to know the etymology, but just picturing shaving a yak. And that’s exactly the way they use it is like, hey, I really want to work on your cool thing, but, you know, I got to get through patching all these machines, and it’s going to take the rest of today and tomorrow, so I’m, you know, yak shaving.

Yeah, shaving coleslaw into rubber boots.

Yeah.

That’s it.

Yeah, I like that one too. Greg, thanks for sharing that. Take care of yourself.

Plains from your workplace.

Thanks, guys.

All right, bye-bye.

You know, I went to a muskox farm outside of Anchorage, Alaska, and I know they’re not the same animals, so nobody needs to correct me on that, but, boy, just imagining shaving one of those with my little Gillette. What a great expression.

We’d love to hear about the language and jargon from your workplace, so call us 877-929-9673 or share your stories in email to words@waywordradio.org.