Today's Words are sponsored by Jenny, May Lyn, Nita, Pei Yee and kam heong crabs.
WOD - aphorism (n) (& friends)
"A product without a market is a cost without revenue," Ahmad said the other day.
"That's a nice aphorism," I responded.
Naturally, as it normally does with Ahmad, this evolved into a discussion on aphorisms and two of my favourite related words. It also helps that he can't bring himself to leave unclicked any link that I send him.
An aphorism is "a concise, pithy phrase expressing a universal truth, an adage" says the Penguin. Of course, this means we now go to Word 2 - pithy (a).
I've always loved pithy. Full of pith. Bursting with pith. Pithy is concise. To the point. It even sounds concise. Tersely cogent. Yummy! Yes... pith is the essential stuff (like the stuff in the middle of plants' stems).We then got involved in a discussion which pretty much sounded like the preceding sentences, except in a long-winded manner. No talk of pithy is complete without a deliberation of Word 3 - laconic (a).
Ah, laconic. That's a good word to describe my brother, as he can be a man of few words. What I didn't know, and now do thanks to Wikipedia, was the word's origins - the brother's laconic phrases are named after Laconia, an area that surrounded Sparta in the old days. To be laconic means, in part, being efficient in delivering your ideas, and can be devastating in disarming frivolous long-drawn rhetoric.
I'll end with two of my favourite examples, both from the Wiki entry:
1) Something more modern: American President Calvin Coolidge had a reputation in private of being a man of few words and was nicknamed "Silent Cal." A possibly apocryphal story has it that Dorthy Parker, seated next to him at a dinner, said to him, "Mr. Coolidge, I've made a bet against a fellow who said it was impossible to get more than two words out of you." His reply: "You lose."
2) And from Sparta: King Demaratus, being annoyed by someone asking him who the most exemplary Spartan was, answered "He that is least like you."
