longueur

plural longueurs

1. authorshipA lengthy passage in a dramatic or literary work, especially a dull or tedious one; a period of boredom.

   [T]he reader can’t help feeling that a few judicious nips and tucks might have dispersed the longueurs that waft around the third quarter of the book.

   2015 October 5, Michiko Kakutani, “Review: ‘City on Fire,’ Garth Risk Hallberg’s Novel of New York in the Bad Old Days”, in New York Times

   3 more examples

   Most of the reasons given for its disappearance make sense: people are happier, busier; the work done by the anti-Freudian skeptics has finally taken hold of the popular imagination, so that people have no time for analytic longueurs and no patience with its mystifications.

   1998 August 17, Adam Gopnik, “Man Goes To See a Doctor”, in The New Yorker

   He cultivated the aura, if not quite of the Anti-Christ, at least of an Anti-Sun King, discountenancing his uncle and shocking the dévots by preferring the intimacy and informality of a clique of drinking companions to the formal longueurs of the courtly round […].

   2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, page 30

   Claire Fontaine (who are actually a duo) have queered the phrase, lending its pungency and ambiguity to a biennale that I wish were nearly so succinct. There are longueurs. There are detours and incomprehensible delays.

   2024 April 22, Adrian Searle, “Venice Biennale 2024 review – everything everywhere all at once”, in The Guardian, →ISSN