An unexpected word is making the rounds, one that causes some embarrassed eyes to lower, some astonished jaws to drop.

The word? Boredom.

Embarrassed because “admitting you're bored,” says Peter Toohey, author of “Boredom: A Lively History” (Yale University Press), “is a bit like saying you burp in church or something dreadful like that. People will deny it.”

Astonished because, well, in this day and age, how could anyone ever be bored? Even in historically boring situations — jury duty room, post office line, last day of the flu — out come the phones to alleviate any of that nonsense.

But boredom shouldn't be seen as “an unpleasant, disgusting experience,” Toohey says. He and others say that mastering it can boost productivity, enhance creativity and more.

“The big problem with the world we live in is that there's no excuse to be bored,” says Austin Kleon, author-illustrator of “Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative” (Workman Publishing) and who, incidentally, doesn't mind being bored. “We're in this culture in which entertainment is at your fingertips 24/7.”

But, adds Kleon, “I think part of an artist's job is to bore yourself into working, I really do.”

At Southern Methodist University, advertising professor Willie Baronet asserts that creativity “is one way to get unbored.” As to whether there exists a link between creativity and boredom, “I'm not a researcher, but this is fascinating to me,” he says.

Whatever it does or doesn't, something about this ho-hum topic is garnering attention. Boredom is so mundane that even the Bible, which deals with all sorts of emotions, doesn't mention it, Toohey points out. (Although the idea that the devil finds work for idle hands apparently goes back to 18th-century hymn-writer Isaac Watts, and Chaucer's 14th-century “Canterbury Tales” quotes St. Jerome about the dangers of being unoccupied.)

“It was trivial until the early 2000s,” says Toohey, a professor of Latin and Greek, among other ancient topics, at the University of Calgary. “There's a book by a Norwegian, which I think is a better book than mine, and that started the topic. There's a huge amount of interest in boredom. People call me all the time to talk about it.”

Kleon, who just released “The Steal Like an Artist Journal” (Workman Publishing, $12.95), says boredom has a movement behind it.

“I think boredom might make a comeback,” he says from his home in Austin, Texas. “I think it's almost a luxurious thing, a decadent thing. To allow yourself to be bored is almost like a pampering thing. I can see a boredom ranch: ‘Come here and be bored!'?”

Here's how boredom has figured into the news lately:

A Spanish company has developed an algorithm to determine, by phone usage, when someone is bored. It then offers suggestions on what to do.

As part of a University of Central Lancashire study linking boredom to creativity, participants were divided into three groups. The first was instructed to copy names from a phone book. The second, to read the phone book, and the third, to do nothing. Booooring! The groups were then asked to take part in a task requiring creativity. The results? Even boredom has layers: Boring activities involving reading led to more creativity “in some circumstances” than boring written activities, which were more creativity-inducing than no pre-task activity at all.

A summary in the journal Science of boredom-related studies found that participants preferred “mundane activities,” including administering electric shocks to themselves, to being in a room alone with their thoughts, even for less than 15 minutes.

Toohey knows how boredom can lead to productivity; it's how he came to write his book.

“It was telling me to do something,” he says. “It drove me to think about it, to sit down, spend a couple of years reading and writing about it.” He pauses. “That sounds pretty boring.”

His research taught him something about himself too: “Realizing that boredom can be a positive experience surprised me, that my proneness to boredom wasn't the product of a lazy, idle nature or being too much of a dreamer, the sort of thing teachers accuse you of being. It's part of me and what I've achieved, which is part a feeling of restlessness, of dissatisfaction and slight disgust of things.”

When Baronet sees people sitting down and looking at their phones, he says, “It makes me wonder, would they be bored otherwise? I've seen people at the museum looking at their phones. I'm not judging or saying it's wrong, but I wonder if it's because they're bored by what's there, or if they find their phones more interesting.”

The short answer, he says, “is that the phone is a fallback. It's very easy to check messages, turn on the phone, stay engaged. There will never be a lack of content.”

Challenging himself to not do so, however, “can provoke me to draw or read or take a walk, to do something likely to cause a different kind of creativity,” he says, “and I like that a lot.”

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC