In context

For most normal folks, drinking means conviviality, companionship and colorful imagination. It means release from care, boredom and worry. It is joyous intimacy with friends and a feeling that life is good. But not so with us in those last days of heavy drinking. The old pleasures were gone. They were but memories. Never could we recapture the great moments of the past. There was an insistent yearning to enjoy life as we once did and a heartbreaking obsession that some new miracle of control would enable us to do it. There was always one more attempt—and one more failure. BB p.151 ¶1

Here: The passage uses boredom for the dull, listless weariness that the normal drinker supposedly escapes through drink: it is listed beside "care" and "worry" as something drinking is felt to release a person from.

In 1939 boredom was a fairly young word with a plain meaning. Webster's Collegiate (5th ed., 1939 printing) defines it only as the "State or fact of being bored." Webster's Revised Unabridged (1913) gives "The state of being bored, or pestered; a state of ennui," and adds a second sense, the realm of bores or bores collectively. The Century Dictionary (1911), in Wordnik's listing, gives "tedium; ennui" and also the sense of being a bore. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the word to 1845, from bore plus -dom, so it was less than a century old. The dictionaries do not say how strong the feeling was. Ennui and tedium suggest weariness and flatness more than distress.

The core sense has not shifted much. Modern dictionaries (WordNet 3.0, the American Heritage entry in Wordnik) still define it as the state or feeling of being bored. What has gone is the old secondary sense of bores as a class, and the word is now used so casually that it can sound trivial. A modern reader may take it as mere idleness.

In this passage the 1939 sense brings out how the three nouns work together. Care and worry are anxious states. Boredom is the flat, tedious one. The "normal folks" use drink against both kinds, and the paragraph's point is that for the alcoholic in the last days of heavy drinking this relief no longer comes. The dictionaries do not settle whether the authors meant anything stronger than ennui, and the passage does not suggest they did. Its weight falls on what follows: the old pleasures became only "memories," and the insistent yearning remained.

Usages

• BB p.152 ¶2 “There you will find release from care, boredom and worry.”
• BB p.220 ¶1 “same frustrations, same boredom, and the same loneliness”
• “The state of being bored, or pestered; a state of ennui.” — Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
• After the second hour of waiting in the empty depot, his boredom turned to a dull, heavy restlessness. illustration, written for this note
• She had thought the new job would cure her boredom, but the days still dragged. illustration, written for this note

Written by Claude (sonnet) from the dictionaries and passages of the lookup; every quotation in it was checked against them, and what could not be found was left out. A study aid, not a source.

The dictionaries of 1939

Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)

WordNet 3.0 (Princeton, 2006)

In the Book 3

Alcoholics Anonymous 3

• BB p.151 ¶1 …folks, drinking means conviviality, companionship and colorful imagination. It means release from care, boredom and worry. It is joyous intimacy with friends and a feeling that life is good. But not so with us in those…
• BB p.152 ¶2 …is vastly more than that. It is a fellowship in Alcoholics Anonymous. There you will find release from care, boredom and worry. Your imagination will be fired. Life will mean something at last. The most satisfactory years of…

Linked from

• BB p.151 ¶1 “boredom”