This is a German academic term that my father taught me several decades ago. It is the ability to sit for hours and hours at some tedious task. Some things just cannot done by a sudden stroke of genius. You just have to sit down and work through them. My parents had plenty of Sitzfleisch and their academic success shows the importance of it.

I was thinking of this lately because I had to muster a considerable amount of Sitzfleisch this past week. My Carleton College class is having its 35 year reunion next June, and I am on the committee. One of things we are working on is a class web site. Somebody thought it be cool to have our pictures from the New Student Book of 1968 (everybody’s high school graduation photo) on the website. I am not sure of the exact title, since everybody referred to it simply as the Zoobook. So one of the committee members scanned the whole book in, carefully labelling each picture. Then I had to upload and label these pictures, all 480 JPEGS, to the website. As a veteran computer worker I thought there ought to be some clever way to script this and do it in bulk. But I did not have quite the access to the site to manage this. So I settled down and in my copious (hah!) spare time uploaded and labeled them all. Hence Sitzfleisch. Chris, who actually scanned all the pictures needed even more Sitzfleisch. I shudder just thinking about how long that took.

A little googling showed that Sitzfleisch is also used in some non-academic contexts. It is considered an essential quality for success in chess and poker, and in listening to Wagner’s operas.