I did not have time to write a short entry (or, for that matter, a short introduction to this section), so I wrote a long one, instead (and I didn’t say that).
How appropriate that Mark Twain, he of quick wit and 500-page books, once wrote in correspondence, “I did not have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead.” The point is
9*
Bill Brohaugh
excellent. Writing concisely and directly takes concentration, revision, and allowing a little time to elapse so one can return to a draft with a fresh eye and spot wordiness, redundancy, and passive, unnecessary filler. And when Anton Chekhov, the Russian playwright who moonlighted as a starship navigator on Star Trek, began his correspondence with Twain, he wrote, “I did not have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead,” which he also did when dropping Abraham Lincoln a letter that Lincoln never opened, perhaps because he needed the envelope for jotting speech notes, but more likely because he was very busy keeping up with his own correspondence. To a friend in Europe, Lincoln wrote, “I did not have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead.” (Lincoln also did not have the time to shorten “four score and seven years ago” into “87,” but that’s another story and a classic Bob Newhart routine.) Lincoln was writing his letter to Francois Marie Arouet, who wrote back, “I did not have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead.” Or maybe just “ditto.” And cc’d Mark Twain. Francois Marie Arouet did however find the time to write a short name: We know him by his nom de plume, Voltaire.
Well, by now you’ve realized that the above paragraph contains a number of factual errors. Voltaire never said “ditto” to Twain, Anton Chekhov never took orders from William Shatner, and none of the famous people so far mentioned originated the clever line about not having time to write a shorter letter.
Samuel Johnson did, of course.
Well, no, he didn't, either. All of the above-mentioned have been credited for the line (all except Shatner, though that may change shortly), and indeed those on our illustrious cast list may have expressed similar drollery at one time or another. But they did not
originate it. In a 1657 letter, Blaise Pascal—scientist, philosopher, namer of early computer programs—wrote “Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.” Now, everything I know about French is wrong, too, so for all I know, this very well could be a souffle recipe. But I believe people when they tell me that it means “I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”
So, one of the great English cliches isn’t from an Englishman or an American or a starship pilot, and it’s not even originally in English.