Pithiness

Issue No. 41

After nearly a week of consuming news non-stop, I felt physically exhausted by how verbose many of the talking heads and analysts on TV were. That made me curious about the opposite extreme: pithy things people had written or said over the years.

It’s a quality I actually adopted early in life, though in recent years, I’ve had to remind myself that there’s a time for being concise and a time for spelling things out. Still, a short statement can sometimes leave a much deeper impression than going on and on about something.

After invading southern Greece, Philip II sent a message to Sparta asking whether he should come as friend or foe. The Spartans replied with, “Neither.”1 So he wrote back:

If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out.

Sparta replied with an even shorter word.

Aika (If).23

These terse comebacks are nowadays called laconic phrases, in reference to the region of Laconia where Sparta is.4 The adjective laconic therefore means “a person, speech, or style of writing using very few words.”

Conway and Soifer submitted a paper in 2005 to The American Mathematical Monthly. It contained two words and two figures.

Two days later, they heard back from the editorial assistant.

The Monthly publishes exposition of mathematics at many levels, and it contains articles both long and short. Your article, however, is a bit too short to be a good Monthly article. . . A line or two of explanation would really help.

Soifer wasn’t having it. He wrote back.

I respectfully disagree … What else is there to explain?5

In the end, the authors had to pad it out with extra words to get it published.

Lander and Parkin’s paper, published in Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, was two sentences long.

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Author unknown. Best I could gather was it came out of from anonymous classified ads in the late 1800s.6

These two campaigns by Apple and Volkswagen used just two words to get a point across. Volkswagen’s aimed to counter the appeal of muscle cars at the time, and Apple’s aimed to establish itself as a brand synonymous with creativity and nonconformity.

This one.

Until next time.

Be well,
Ali

P.S. Some past issues to read through in case you missed them.