The Soul of Wit

Apparently I’m just too wordy. My wife’s comment after reading ‘All that Glitters’ was simply to state, “Yeah, that was too long. People don’t want to read that much.” This makes me wonder what exactly the limit is. How long is the attention span of the average person that they can’t traipse through a page of text for free stuff? I’d imagine that’s less than a minute’s worth of reading, is a minute not worth $12,000? Have we become so overwhelmed by the deluge of information from television and radio that a minute is just too long to spend reading? So is everything I write for an audience of none unless it’s less than 5 words long? Perhaps if I’d written simply: “@@ Free 25,000 basketball cards 4 you!!” they’d be out of my trunk now? Does Joe Average ignore every piece of textual information that can’t fit into the title of an eBay auction listing? Everything after 55 characters is just needless fluff it seems.

Perhaps brevity is the soul of wit but some things just can’t be condensed and still retain their vigor. When everything around us written in the minimalist style of the New York Times, boiled down to its bones, what art will be left in the written word? In Orwell’s 1984, ‘The Party’ is on a continual campaign to reduce the number of words in the dictionary. The theory went that nobody can utter a thought that they can’t express in words so to end sedition we merely eliminate all the words required to verbalize those thoughts. Luckily, in the real world, we won’t need to resort to such means. We’ll just quietly ignore anything that falls outside the boundaries of our newfound norms and build our own Orwellian Newspeak around consensus. Well, consensus of everyone that really matters at least. The Ministry of Truth will take care of everyone else.

We will then enter upon the golden age of literature! Oh! I can barely await those halcyon days when we can plumb the very depths of every book, news article and scholarly journal by a mere perusal of the title. But please, 55 characters or less. Anyway, can’t write any more, I’m off the read “Oliver Twist was orphan Met Fagan But Was OK In the End” again for the 465th time!