Superserviceable

Su`per`serv´ice`a`ble


a. 1. Overofficious; doing more than is required or desired.
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, published 1913 by G. & C. Merriam Co.
References in classic literature ?
Why should we be busybodies and superserviceable? Action and inaction are alike to the true.
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He explains that Oswald is a servant of a particular type, "a superserviceable...
When Kent speaks of Oswald as one of those "superserviceable...
But outrage over the "superserviceable zeal" of police was tempered by the early effectiveness of union pickets and hopes of reaching a settlement.
Social conflict and the politics of reform: Mayor James D. Phelan and the San Francisco waterfront strike of 1901
"Superserviceable Feminism." Over Ten Million Served: Gendered Service in Language and Literature Workplaces.
Uneasy work
Finally, arts and sciences at their best are what Emerson in his Journals calls "superserviceable." He lists the word "superserviceable" among "English words which I never use" for which "my style is so much the poorer" (JMN 5:165), and yet he jots down the word elsewhere in the midst of his discussion of reform, art, and science (JMN 5:112).
"This prospering country is your ornament": Emerson and the "instructive" value of the cosmopolitan project
I have written such analyses, too, have made those arguments, and have done so most recently in an essay entitled, "Superserviceable Subordinates, Universal Access, and Prestige-Driven Research," in which I argue that because a class system has now been institutionalized within the profession itself, we should assess the structural conditions that have resulted in it, creating permanent subordinate status and inequality for legions of graduate students, adjuncts, and full-time non-tenure-track instructors-persons the MLA calls "education service workers" (1997, 21).
Two structural conditions are crucial, as I argue in "Superserviceable Subordinates": the development of a prestige-based research culture and the push to make access to higher education universal in the population.
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