sedentary
adjective

- involving much sitting and little physical exercise

- doing or requiring much sitting

- tending to remain in one place

- not migratory, especially of an animal

Cambridge Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster

—
WORD ORIGIN

Sedentary entered English in the 1590s. Its earliest recorded use described assemblies or governing bodies that remained in one place, in contrast with ambulatory bodies that moved from place to place.

It came through French sédentaire and from Latin sedentarius, meaning “sitting” or “remaining in one place”. That word grew from sedens, the present participle of sedere, “to sit”.

The same Latin family produced session, originally an act of sitting, and president, literally someone who “sits before” or presides. Sediment belongs there too: it is material that settles and sits at the bottom. Over time, sedentary expanded from fixed institutions and non-migrating people or animals to occupations and habits involving prolonged sitting and little movement.

—
THE CLUE ON THE TOP DECK

In the early 1950s, London’s double-decker buses offered epidemiologist Jeremy Morris an unusually tidy natural experiment.

Drivers and conductors were men from broadly similar backgrounds, working the same routes in the same traffic. One group, however, spent about 90 per cent of each shift sitting. Conductors repeatedly climbed the buses’ stairs, collecting fares and helping passengers.

Morris and his colleagues examined sickness records from thousands of transport workers. Their 1953 Lancet study found that conductors experienced less coronary heart disease than drivers; when disease occurred, it tended to appear later. The researchers then found a similar contrast between postal workers who delivered mail and more stationary colleagues.

Could body size explain it? London Transport supplied uniform measurements, allowing Morris to compare waistbands. The difference in heart risk persisted across body sizes.

Today, the connection between movement and heart health sounds obvious. At the time, many experts doubted that ordinary physical activity could matter so much. Morris’s insight came not from a laboratory machine but from noticing that two nearly identical jobs placed their workers in very different relationships with a staircase.

The buses followed the same routes; their workers’ bodies did not.

Helga & Paul Smith

—
SYNONYMS

desk-bound, inactive, seated, SEDENTARY, settled (non-migratory), stationary

—

SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

“Since working from home, I’ve become far more SEDENTARY than I realised.”

____________________

PLEASE SUPPORT US

On evenings and weekends, I research and write your daily OWAD newsletter together with Helga (my lovely wife and business partner) and our insightful daughter Jennifer. It remains FREE, AD-FREE, and ALIVE thanks to voluntary donations from appreciative readers.

If you aren't already, please consider supporting us — even a small donation, equivalent to just 1-cup-of-coffee a month, would help us in covering expenses for mailing, site-hosting, maintenance, and service.

Just head over to DonorBox:

https://donorbox.org/owad-q4-2023-5
   or
Bank transfer:

Paul Smith

IBAN: DE75 7316 0000 0002 5477 40
(Important: please state as 'Verwendungszweck': "OWAD donation" and the email address used to subscribe to OWAD)

Thanks so much,
Paul Smith