longueur

noun

Etymology: Borrowed from French longueur (literally “length”).

1. A lengthy passage in a dramatic or literary work, especially a dull or tedious one; a period of boredom.

   “Most of the reasons given for its disappearance make sense: people are happier, busier; the work done by the anti-Freudian skeptics has finally taken hold of the popular imagination, so that people have no time for analytic longueurs and no patience with its mystifications.”

   “He cultivated the aura, if not quite of the Anti-Christ, at least of an Anti-Sun King, discountenancing his uncle and shocking the dévots by preferring the intimacy and informality of a clique of drinking companions to the formal longueurs of the courtly round […].”