196. Herculean

From, “Native Tongues,” Lapham’s Quarterly, 4/5/12:

The fieldwork was Herculean.

Herculean, that is, in the performance of the lexical work alone One shouldn’t forget the nonlexical difficulties the fieldworkers might have encountered too. This being the late sixties, the time of Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, My Lai, and the Watts riots, suspicion, hostility, and violence abounded—and not a few of the volunteers, especially the shaggier-haired and more obviously intrusive and inquisitive, were chased out of town, threatened, and even arrested, accused of stirring things up and fomenting trouble.

Herculean: requiring great strength or effort, extraordinary power (derived from the mythological Hercules)