On Laconism
My English teacher said I was laconic. I spent years thinking it was a flaw.
I was around twelve, having an English lesson at home. The phone rang. My teacher told me to go ahead and answer it.
I did. I was brief. I hung up.
She said: you are very laconic.
She explained it means getting right to the point with very few words.
I still did not know if it was a compliment. I just carried it for years as something that was probably wrong with me. Too short. Too little. Not enough.
Laconia is a region in Greece. Sparta sat there.
The Spartans were famous for many things. One of them was how they spoke: briefly, precisely, without ornament. Philip of Macedon sent them a threat: "If I enter Laconia, I will raze Sparta to the ground." The Spartan reply was a single word:
If.
We still use the word "laconic" because of them.
I did not know, as a child answering that phone, that the thing my teacher was naming had a history. That it came from somewhere. That it was not a deficiency but a discipline.
Compression forces clarity. When you cannot add another sentence, you have to figure out what you actually mean. Most of what gets cut was covering for thoughts that were not yet finished.
Long writing can hide. Short writing cannot.
I apply this to code too. A function name that says exactly what it does. A PR description that says why, not what. A spec that fits on one screen.
When it doesn't fit on one screen, I haven't finished thinking yet.
This site will be laconic. Not because I have little to say. Because I finally understood that saying less, precisely, is harder than saying more.
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