Again, context is all-important. After his death Christopher Hitchens was hailed as a tireless polemicist, a tireless contrarian, a tireless drinker and so on. That was fine and reasonable in the world of newspaper deadlines. Given Hitchens’s exacting sense of style, however, one wonders if he was feeling a bit tired (and God knows, he was entitled to, with everything else that was going on) when, in these very pages, he remarked on Arthur Koestler’s “life of tireless and sensational debauchery.” I was struck by this because it recalled his famous description, a few years previously, of the philosopher A. J. Ayer as “a tireless and justly celebrated fornicator” in “Hitch-22.”

The better the writer, the more striking it is to find him succumbing to the weary charms of the tireless. So it was entirely predictable that, in his gloriously inept biography of Hitch’s great friend Martin Amis, Richard Bradford should characterize the writer Peter Ackroyd as a “tireless scourge” and then, 12 pages later, refer to “the tireless routines of academe.” But it was a surprise to discover Amis claiming, in “The Moronic Inferno,” that between 1950 and 1980 Norman Mailer was engaged in “a tireless quest for a fistfight” (surprising that Amis used the t-word, I mean, not that Mailer was so desperate for punch-ups). This was from the early 1980s, when Amis was in his early 30s — just a year or two after he’d paid tribute to Vladimir Nabokov’s “tireless attempt to pay full justice to the weird essence of things” — and when he was the least tired and most energetic stylist in a thoroughly exhausted Britain. Perhaps something happens when writers are looking up to those they admire: they fall prey to a kind of usage that is an acknowledgment of the futility of trying to scale such Himalayan heights.

By now, like someone investigating allegations of corporate corruption, I found that I was moving higher and higher up the literary totem pole, that this thing went, as they say, right to the top. (Did Nabokov, who looked up to almost no one — “Jolly good view from up here” was his reply when asked about his “position in the world of letters” — ever use the word “tirelessly”? Tell me. I’d like to know.)

If ever a writer merited the term “tireless” it was John Updike. In the words of James Wood (praised by Malcolm Bradbury as a “tireless interpreter”), it seemed “easier for John Updike to stifle a yawn than to refrain from writing a book.” Surely, the ever nimble Updike would never have yielded to the tired lure of the tireless — would he? Except he did, in a passage near the end of “Self-Consciousness” while discussing the “tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders.” And in the recent collection “Higher Gossip,” Updike informs us that J. M. W. Turner used his sketchbook “tirelessly.”

And what of the indefatigable Joyce Carol Oates? Any sight of a stray “tireless” there? I’ve not spotted one but I’d be interested to hear. This is not a rigorous research project; I have neither the stamina nor the funding for that. And I’ve not resorted to Google. I’m just mentioning something that I’ve stumbled on — and over. Also, in the style of Christopher Ricks, who has looked at Bob Dylan’s ability to revitalize clichés in songs like “I Shall Be Free” — “the phrase ‘seen better days’ has itself seen better days” — I was curious to see if there were examples of people using “tireless” in such a way as to make it seem less tired. Well, if there are I haven’t found them. It is so thoroughly used up, tired and worn out that no one seems able to bring it back from the dead — and yet, by drawing deep on its own essence, it remains absolutely tireless in its capacity to survive, like a verbal equivalent of the undead.