Pithiness

The shortest letter, paper, ad, story, issue

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.

Shortest letter to a king

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.”

Many people don’t realize that the Spartan guy in charge actually texted Philip II “lol, as if” but historians took out the “lol” to maintain his image as a serious leader.

Shortest academic paper

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

Building a Bridge III: from Problems of Mathematical Olympiads to Open Problems of Mathematics (source, by way of source)

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.

Shortest academic paper that was actually published

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

L. J. Lander and T. R. Parkin, “Counterexample to Euler’s conjecture on sums of like powers,” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 72 (6), November 1966 (source)

Shortest story

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

Short ad copies

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.

“Think different.” Apple’s ad campaign that ran from 1997 to 2002 (source).

“Think small.” Volkswagen’s ad campaign introduced in 1959 (source).

Shortest issue of The Critical Thinker

This one.

The problem in our country isn’t with books being banned, but with people no longer reading … You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

—Ray Bradbury

Until next time.

Be well,
Ali

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

The Sunk Cost Fallacy and How It Influences Our Decisions

Back in My Day; How Nostalgia Messes With Our Minds

There’s An Upside to Imposter Thoughts? With Basima Tewfik

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More about these books here

1. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/De_garrulitate*.html

2. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Sayings_of_Spartans*/unknown.html

3. The Spartans must have been fun at parties.

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase

5. https://www.wfnmc.org/mc20101.pdf

6. There are subreddits I occasionally visit where users share two-sentence stories.