ARTS OF ABBREVIATION.

Proverbs and Epigrams.—Proverbs are average readings of every-day life winnowed of all the husks of expression. Each is the kernel of the popular sense. “It never rains but it pours.” “Troubles never come single.” “Money breeds money.” “When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out the window.” “Nothing succeeds like success.” “It never smokes but there is fire.” The epigram, or winged saying, must, equally, pack much wit into small bulk. The pungency of the epigram is the double taste of some prominent word in it—the apparent or conventional sense and the contradiction thereof: “Life would be intolerable but for its pleasures.” “The child of the father is the man.” “The more haste the less speed.” “Every man wishes to live long, but no one to be old.” “Language is the art of concealing thought” “ ‘Tis all your business, business how to shun.” “Nature is commanded by obeying her.”

Akin to the epigram is the winged saying whereby two things apparently incongruous being brought into conjunction, each becomes affected in meaning by its yoke-fellow: “Smelling of musk and of insolence”; “Some killed partridges, others time only”; “He died full of honors and of an aspic of plovers’s eggs”. […]

Ellipsis.—An Ellipsis is often more expressive than any express statement. “The jest is clearly to be seen not in the words, but in the gap between.” “They have two faults, they do generally lie and steal: barring these—!” “In Sumatra are large fire-flies, which people stick upon spits to illuminate the ways. Persons of condition thereby travel with a pleasant radiance they much admire. Great honor to the fire-flies. But—!”

Suggestiveness.—Akin to ellipsis is suggestiveness—the art of only suggesting particulars which the reader can supply for himself. When, after long years of hardships and adventures in foreign lands, a man (of the olden times) is described returning middle-aged and bronzed to the village whence he set out a beardless youth, and meeting a boy gathers how the boy is the son of the lass of his young and cherished love, what writer, by exhausting all the details implied in that chance piece of news, would spare the reader the effort of counting its value?