Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 September 3

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September 3

is there a word that means unpleasant but necessary

long wall of not-that-relevant text, question is in title SemanticMantis (talk) 13:50, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

i know there is. more than one in fairly common usage i just er impaired and its gone but far more um ponderable is my seeming inability to use the internet or,more accurately its seeming determination not to be used by me. ever. not to purpose anyway. i am on it now directly without the use of an intermediary and unsupervised tho i do not lie when i say i have needed either to do absolutely anything. I dont just mean i was in a social and generational(just} bracket that could ignore it in the nineties and only kinda want it in the following decade.I still had cause and opportunity occasionally to use it and put down my complete failiure to successfully achieve what i set out to do without help to my own technical dumbassery and the medium itself. the www they said will change everything yet did nothing u couldnt do before thru myriad older media or seperate gadgets.sometimes twas better the new way often it was not and still is not.Yet if it didnt change it certainly affected everything.which kinda disadvantadges people like me. If there are any.perhaps an interesting phenomenon today could become a recognised disability tomorrow or else would have profound implications vis a vis the nature of reality,cause and effect,and.....well. Everything so lets hope.... well,.. assume i just an idiot with too much time.... tho it was strange that first time i tried to use www. Ihad sampled it before ofcourse but always dissapointed tho not surprised.I had put that down to poor content or atleast my inability to find good content n did not persist.a few yrs later tho I heared tell of treasure and had to investigate....free music..too good to be true surely.yep.when i finally hooked up, with,ofcourse all kinds of help and a full year of infuriating teething problems and false starts.... films and tv u cant watch here.not without cash u dont. live pay tv sports.mmmm...eventually.. but with u piggy back wireless connection pretty much unwatchable. docs{}_?punctuation keys all mixed up btw since i inherited this laptop. no probs b4 apparently. docs yeh but never once the ones i set out to watch.and so on all of which can be explained by my inability to navigate and poor equipment. look i have just obliterated something i been working on before this that took me hours while simultaneously spilling coffee everywhere and doing the equivalent of dropping this on its head given its condition i just glad it working still fingers crossed. this wouldve been the first thing i actually posted apart from 3 things on wordpress which i cannot find now and asssume are lost or more likely never posted in first place and,more,if i got an answer to the title question,the first time i successfully used www. but i havent even begun with the stuff that defies explanation tho that makes it sound far more dramatic than basically 1 guy attempts repeatedly to do online simple things he could do by the age of four writing on paper 2 screen unresponsive 3 someone else does exactly the same and gets response 4 guy goes again no joy 5 does it with helper watching still dont work 6 helper repeats. successful 7 running joke about my fillings affecting computer is born. thats about it only over the years anything technical needs help but many r like that no biggie and www only rarely used apart from radio archives tv catchup and fball highlights n old albums without fkin adverts on u tube. dont count that tho cos 100s hrs old radio progs is just using a laptop as a radio.even the wireless bandwidths r old terrestrial tv ones. only rarely using www over 5yrs mounts up tho when ur inexplicably confounded again and again. last time 2days ago applied for payday online wonga thing for first time.they dyin to givem out as my mobile phone will attest with the fiftieth unsolicited txt in two days literally plinking as i wrote attest. spooooky. oh. actually was my mobile provider.anyway musta filled out 4 different forms multiple times. nothing. not a refusal just refreshed pages like the unresponsive screens from years ago. only response was from the credit checking company sayin my credit was good.if i had gone online to get a credit check u can bet i wld have logged off with a £100 loan but no credit check.and now 2 dictionary sites ask jeeves and the wikipedia language section all attest theres no english word meaning unpleasant but necessary.IF that really is the case then we are in matrix territory.its predictive txts all over again explain that one later maybe. unlikely tho given all i ve just wrote that i will be able to post this. here goes nothin. no quelle surprise oh wait — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.146.234.217 (talk) 08:09, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

We have the phrases "a bitter pill to swallow" and "a necessary evil" that both fit, but I can't think of a single word. SemanticMantis (talk) 13:50, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Nothing beats a bit of plane speaking. Martinevans123 (talk) 14:16, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

As stated above, "necessary evil" is what first came to my mind. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 16:57, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

There are quite a few words meaning "unpleasant but necessary task" - chore, bind (2), grind (4), fag (2:1) - but not an obvious adjective with that meaning. There's wheady (which I've shamelessly nicked from Mark Forsyth), but that's hardly a common word. Tevildo (talk) 18:48, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Wretched duty, but like everyone else I've been unable to come up with a one word synonym. Akld guy (talk) 01:20, 4 September 2015 (UTC)