The Long and Short of It

There are two kinds of people: Those who practice brevity as the soul of wit* and those who are windbags.

The title of this post (542 words – the post, not the title) is an English idiom that dates back to cir. 1500, and was originally written as "the schorte and the longe of it." According to page 1129 of my unabridged copy of the The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (2,386 pages requiring a magnifying glass to read), the phrase means: "the sum total, substance, upshot; also, to make a long story short."

Making a long story short is the credo of the Internet. Sometimes I think that's good, yet I struggle with the notion that we can reduce the complexities of the world to a soundbite. I am a storyteller. Those who read this blog regularly know I am not a victim of brevity. The joy of these essays for me is taking an idea, examining it from all sides (or at least two sides), discovering tangents and relationships, then weaving them together into a cohesive whole.

Don't get me wrong; I like the short form, too; I'm practically addicted to the 140 character pith of Twitter.

But are we bowing down to the notion that 21st Century Americans are incapable of following a sustained argument? Must we cater to ever-shortening attention spans, or does that just exacerbate the problem? It breaks my heart to hear my 14 year old say he doesn't like to read novels because they are too long. Too long for what?

On the other hand, as an editor I appreciate the beauty of a succinct sentence honed to its essence. It's a search and destroy mission where my crosshairs settle on extraneous "thats" and pointless "in order tos". Perhaps the best advice ever given to writers comes from Elmore Leonard: "When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip."

Ironically, it was at the hands of storyteller Janice Del Negro that I learned an important lesson about keeping things short and sweet. In a workshop exercise, she asked us to retell a well-known story in a Haiku (a three line poem, with 17 syllables — 5-7-5). I loved the prompt (see my example here), and learned even epic tales can be distilled to just a few words.

But should they be? Is luxurious language passé? Or is there still time for the long, slow road of War and Peace (587,287 words), the grand scale of Gone With the Wind (423,575 words), or the symphony of multiple viewpoints in The Poisonwood Bible (177,679 words)?

I think — I hope — there is room for both. But then I remember the catastrophe that was the mullet (business in the front, party in the back), and I have my doubts.



FYI, that whole brevity being the soul of wit thing is actually part of a much longer sentence:

*Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief: your noble son is mad:
Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,
What is't but to be nothing else but mad?

— from Hamlet (32,241 words), by William Shakespeare


Your comments (short, long or somewhere in the middle) are always welcome.

Play with Your Words

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who love words and those who don't.

I admit it, I am a logophile — a connoisseur of words, both written and spoken. From Fortune magazine to fortune cookies, I believe good writing is an art, a craft, a science, a philosophy, a religion, a mission and a passion.

While working at a bank during college, it occurred to me that almost every business problem I encountered related in one way or another to miscommunication. Muddy manuals, inadequate instructions and derisory documents confounded the workplace, so I decided to major in business communications.

But words aren't all business for me. I like to play with my words, and my favorite gift of all time was a single-volume edition of The Complete Oxford English Dictionary (that even came with it's own magnifying glass). As much as I treasure my OED, I am finding new online resources that allow me to wangle my words in all kinds of interesting ways.

At rhymezone.com, for example, in addition to definitions, you can look up rhymes and synonyms and homophones. I also love onelook.com, an online search engine of more than 900 dictionaries that provides hours of fun. I once heard a comedian say that "K" words are funny. At onelook.com, you can search *k*k*k* for words that contain at least three "K"s, with results that include kickback, knickknackery and skunkworks.

I love Scrabble®, too, although my brother and stepson beat me at it regularly. It turns out that it's not enough to have a first-class vocabulary, you have to be able to strategize, too. Big words are fine, but it's those pesky two- and three-letter Scrabblisms, properly placed on bonus squares, that will lead you to victory — words like zax and xi and qat (a "Q" word that doesn't require a "U"). For the record, my best ever Scrabble® word was "hosiery" on a triple word score.

My husband hates Scrabble® and other such word-related endeavors. He says English is his second language — he doesn't have a first. He doesn't get excited by finding a quirky synonym for alphabetical (abecedarian — pronounced A-B-C-darian). He does not fall on the floor laughing when I tell him about the sign over the aisle at the grocery store that reads: "Feminine Hygiene/ Incontinents." He doesn't even crack up over my mother's inadvertent puns:  "Frankly, I think I'll have a hotdog."

I say play with your words. At freerice.com, you can play a word game, improve your vocabulary and help end world hunger, all for free. Click here to share your favorite word or email me at 2KoPeople@gmail.com.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net