I love it when a word comes to the surface that really fits its need. 

Julian Burnside (offical web site caution: Ugly!, selected history) wrote well on it in his book Wordwatching although he was talking about Black Holes:  Places in English where dispite our vast vocabularly and rich idomatic variations, it [English] lacks words for some common and useful ideas. (p19).  These black holes are unnaturalized foreign words.  Faux pas and deja vu make for common French examples and Schadenfreude from German.  The point of these are that the word as it is fits exactly the sentament. 

Douglas Adams, famed creator of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy also took on this subject in his book The Meaning of Liff (with John Lloyd, who later produced Blackadder), where he took little-used British place names and gave them definitions so that they could be used in conversation.  Kind of like a Robin Hood for the language:  Take a word from where no one cares much and give it to common usage.  Adams' purpose is closer aligned with this blog post than Burnside's broad historical take.  For example Skibbereen (in reality a city in West Cork, Ireland) should now mean: the noise made by a sunburned leg leaving a plastic chair.  The point of this further distraction is the meaning is not only familiar adn unnamed but modern.

To the point of all this, today I learned about the phrase Yak Shaving.  It describes situation you get yourself into when in order to do a given task you must first do another task, which itself cannot be done until you do a third task, and before long you are doing something that is completely unrelated to the task you actually intended to do but logically must preceed it.

The Wikipedia article has an excellent (allbeit New York-centric) example, as follows:

I want to wax the car today.

Oops, the hose is still broken from the winter. I'll need to buy a new one at Home Depot.

But Home Depot is on the other side of the Tappan Zee bridge and getting there without my EZPass is miserable because of the tolls.

But, wait! I could borrow my neighbor's EZPass...

Bob won't lend me his EZPass until I return the mooshi pillow my son borrowed, though.

And we haven't returned it because some of the stuffing fell out and we need to get some yak hair to restuff it.

And the next thing you know, you're at the zoo, shaving a yak, all so you can wax your car.

NB: This example actually refers to shaving a Yak, but that is only to illustrate the point.  Really it can be any kind of multi-level distraction.