Quotidian:
Of or occurring every day; daily.
‘the car sped noisily off through the quotidian traffic’ [Oxford Living Dictionaries]
Seen in a book review, “How we lost the world-changing power of useless knowledge,” Simon Ings, NewScientist (18 March 2017):
At a time when academia is once again under pressure to account for itself, the Princeton University Press reprint of Flexner’s essay is timely. Its preface, however, is another matter. Written by current institute director Robbert Dijkgraaf, it exposes our utterly instrumental times. For example, he employs junk metrics such as “more than half of all economic growth comes from innovation”. What for Flexner was a rather sardonic nod to the bottom line, has become for Dijkgraaf the entire argument – as though “pure research” simply meant “long-term investment”, and civic support came not from existential confidence and intellectual curiosity, but from scientists “sharing the latest discoveries and personal stories”. So much for escaping quotidian demands.
