| ▲ | tpoacher 3 hours ago | |||||||
Reminds me of the classic Mark Twain quote: "Apologies, I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one." | ||||||||
| ▲ | adzm 2 hours ago | parent [-] | |||||||
> I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one. First known use in English comes from a 1658 translation of Blaise Pascal in 1657 > Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. translated to > I had not made this longer then the rest, but that I had not the leisure to make it shorter then it is. (note the archaic then) This was a popular piece of wit at the time. Mark Twain wrote something similar a hundred years later > You'll have to excuse my lengthiness - the reason I dread writing letters is because I am so apt to get to slinging wisdom & forget to let up. Thus much precious time is lost. But it's still quite different. There is a great article about this one on quoteinvestigator! https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ | ||||||||
| ||||||||