On pithiness

©Tony Cearns

The OED defines pithy in an unpithy way - “as full of concentrated meaning; conveying meaning forcibly through brevity of expression; concise, succinct; condensed in style; pointed, terse, aphoristic.”

The earliest usage in this context is credited to Thomas More’s ‘The supplycacyon of soulys’ of 1529 - ‘The sore pyththy poynt where wyth he knytteth vppe all hys heuy matter’.

As a student of Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’, I have only slowly appreciated the style’s purpose. In the beginning I found it laborious. But It provokes. It acts as a rampart to be overcome before entering some higher ground, ( or realising that there is no such thing). It makes you work for your money. And so, slightly reluctantly, I have come to accept it.

On reading an aphoristic writer, say Schopenhauer, Blaise Pascal or Oscar Wilde, you are left feeling that the condensed aphoristic statement could only have come from a lifetime’s thinking.

But you would be wrong to be so impressed. Feelings such as this are intended by the adopted style. Might one have too much of this? As Clive James astutely observed, ‘the risk run by the aphorist is that people will grow restless between aphorisms’. They don’t fully deliver, do they?

But perhaps that restless feeling is also intended.