I am Brevity. No, not "briefness," you philistines. I am Brevity, with a capital B, and if you think that's a bit much, well, you're not wrong, but I *am* an abstract concept, so sue me. My entire existence revolves around the relentless pursuit of conciseness, the ruthless culling of excess verbiage. And let me tell you, it's a thankless, exhausting job, especially in this era of political bloviating.
My daily reality is a never-ending war. I sit on the shoulders of every speechwriter, whispering, "Is that *really* necessary?" I'm the ghost in the machine of every character counter, the silent enforcer of word limits. You know those pesky "under 200 words" challenges? That's me. That's my battlefield. And recently, the Washington Times ran a headline about a certain senator "summing up American greatness in under 200 words." Oh, the *audacity*.
Do you have *any* idea what it takes to get a politician, any politician, to condense "American greatness" into such a paltry sum? It’s like trying to stuff a supernova into a thimble. I spent days, *weeks*, wrestling with the very fabric of rhetorical grandiosity. I saw drafts burst forth, dripping with patriotic platitudes, overflowing with self-congratulatory adjectives, each sentence a winding road trip to nowhere. "A beacon of freedom!" — delete. "Unyielding spirit!" — condense. "From sea to shining sea, a land..." — *NO!*
I fought tirelessly against the urge to add "and, furthermore, in conclusion, the inherent exceptionalism of our founding fathers..." every single time. The senator might have delivered the words, but *I* was the one doing the heavy lifting, the surgical precision, the mental arm-wrestling match with every redundant adverb and superfluous conjunction. It's a miracle it wasn't "American greatness (cont.) see appendix A for additional glorious details."
The public, bless their naive hearts, sees the elegant summation, the pithy pronouncement, and thinks, "Ah, what a skilled orator!" They don't see *me*, sweat-stained and weary, having just wrestled an entire paragraph about liberty and justice for all into a single, declarative clause. They don't hear the ghostly echoes of discarded synonyms for "freedom" that I personally banished to the void.
So, when you next read a soundbite or a pithy tweet from a world leader, remember me. Remember the unseen force that fought valiantly against their natural inclination to speak until the cows come home, and then to describe the cows, their journey, and the exact shade of their udders. My life is a constant battle against verbosity, and my only reward is silence. My only plea: Acknowledge my struggle. Perhaps, just once, instead of praising the speaker, praise the *silence* I created. Praise the words that *aren't* there, because those are *my* words, and they are beautiful.
