Word of the Day

: December 21, 2023

Kafkaesque

adjective kahf-kuh-ESK

What It Means

Something described as Kafkaesque has an often nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality to it. More broadly, anything relating to or suggestive of the writing of Franz Kafka may be said to be Kafkaesque.

// The airline is notorious for its Kafkaesque procedures for changing flights, even in situations where a flight is cancelled due to bad weather.

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Kafkaesque in Context

“Two people who had recently navigated the state’s maze of housing programs also spoke to lawmakers on Thursday. ... Those living in poverty are expected to complete mountains of complicated paperwork to access aid and can be harshly penalized for any errors. For help, they must rely on overtaxed social workers, who are themselves often stumped by the Kafkaesque bureaucracy their clients face.” — Lola Duffort, VTDigger.org (Montpelier, Vermont), 6 Oct. 2023

Did You Know?

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a Czech-born German-language writer whose surreal fiction vividly expressed the anxiety, alienation, and powerlessness of the individual in the 20th century. The opening sentence of his 1915 story The Metamorphosis has become one of the most famous in Western literature (“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect”), while in his novel The Trial, published a year after his death, a young man finds himself caught up in the mindless bureaucracy of the law after being charged with a crime that is never named. So deft was Kafka’s prose at detailing nightmarish settings in which characters are crushed by nonsensical, blind authority, that writers began using his name as an adjective a mere 16 years after his death. Although many other literary eponyms, from Austenian to Homeric, exist and are common enough, Kafkaesque gets employed more than most and in a wide variety of contexts, leading to occasional charges that the word has been watered down and given a lack of specificity due to overuse.