When The Moon Sings - March 29, 2025

The word of the week is laconic.  If you look through Merriam Webster, it means concise, terse, perhaps succinct.  People who can put their thoughts in few words and still convey the full meaning may be said to be laconic.  I admire that ability; occasionally I have achieved it, though not as often as I’ve hoped or even sometimes believed.

It’s an ancient word, with Greek roots.  Laconic refers to the people of Laconia, an ancient region where people were known for their disdain of eloquence.  Laconia is on the southeastern tip of Greece, a mountainous, but arable region known for agriculture, now as in past centuries.  The major city in the region was Sparta.  Spartans were known, now and then, for citrus and olive crops, but the ancient Spartans were also known for heavy infantry and for verbal economy.

Ancient literature bubbles over with Spartan conciseness stories.  According to Plutarch, Phillip of Macedon, Alexander’s father, decided to take his army into Laconia and asked the Spartans whether he should arrive as a friend or a foe.  “Neither” was the answer.  When an overwhelming Persian force demanded the Spartans surrender and turn over their weapons, the answer was “come get them.”  You can find several others with minimal effort.

The Greeks of that era valued rhetoric, and the Spartans fought the current with their terseness.  They acquired a reputation for being rather stupid – for the others, it was a matter of capacity, not taste.  Socrates thought otherwise – this is from his Dialogues:

 "...they claim not to have any interest in [philosophy] and put on this big show of being morons...because...they want people to think that their superiority rests on fighting battles and being manly... You can tell that what I say is true, and that Spartans are the best educated in philosophy and argument, by this: if one associates with the most inferior Spartan, one at first finds him somewhat inferior in speech; but then at some chance point in the discussion he throws in a remark worthy of noticing, brief and terse, like a skilled marksman, so that the person he's talking to appears no better than a child."

The idea seems to be that the more time you spend crafting your words, the less capable you are of taking any action.  Socrates pointed out that the idea wasn’t always true. 

But the stereotype created by the Spartans captured the imagination and was applied to other people, both by themselves and the people who surrounded them.  As a region, Scandinavia is not known for eloquence, but even among Scandinavians, the Finnish people are known for brevity of speech and tenacity of spirit.  A BBC profile noted that “Finns tend to take words literally and value truthfulness, with superlative statements like "the best" being met with skepticism unless backed by solid evidence.”

The stereotype appears frequently here in the US as well – New Englanders in general and especially in the state of Maine, farmers and backwoodsmen, and cowboys, especially cowboys.  Whatever the reality, the movies have given cowboy heroes a terseness that the Spartans would find admirable.  From John Wayne to Clint Eastwood, westerners with few words and sharp aiming have dominated the theater.  The movie High Noon came out in 1952 – it portrayed a sheriff who cared for his wife as much as his job and actually said so.  That upset people – John Wayne called it the most un-American movie he had ever seen. 

The success of those movies led producers the search for other heroes of the same stripe – including going back to the Spartans.  The movie 300 was strong on the concept and weak on historical accuracy, but the producers thought that’s what the public wanted. They were right – the movie succeeded mightily.

Being able to express a complete thought with minimal words so that others understand it is admirable.  Mumbling a few words that leave listeners in the dark is not, nor is throwing off a term, usually value-laden that lacks specificity.  The Spartans declared at least one war by stating that the other city had offended the Spartan gods.  Obviously, offending gods, anyone’s gods, should be avoided.   But the Spartans never got around to stating what particular actions had done the offending.  If they had, it might have led to negotiation.  Causes seems to have included everything from trade disputes to competition for resources to personal slights.   

Similarly, in the Soviet era in Russia, having your ideas labeled as revisionist was to refute  them, without being terribly specific about what was offensive.  Having your person labeled as revisionist was a sentence, sometimes criminal and just as often fatal.  Accusing a person of some lurid heresy without specifying what the heresy was has become standard practice in the guidebook Authoritarianism for Dummies.  The twentieth century seemed to specialize in that, and the twenty first has no shortage of incidents.

On this side of the Atlantic, our formal arrangements discourage laconic accusations.  We have laws the presume innocence until guilt is proven, and others that demand the legal process guide all formal accusations.  Informally, our vulnerability to lurid accusations remains.  Perhaps we react more to them now – we call laconic utterances “sound bites,” when brevity overwhelms justness or completeness.  They also support our never-ending search for not just answers, but easy ones.  Everything is easy if you don’t consider the entire problem.

But the romantic stereotype remains, the hero with few words and many actions, usually violent.  We find them in all sorts of entertainment, not just movies.  But stories have a beginning and an end, past which the consequences of those bold actions don’t matter.  Reality works differently, and sooner or later, the accounting for everything appears.

The exchange between Phillip of Macedonia and the Spartans is worthy of an extended story, and probably would already be one if things had worked out differently, if the Spartans had been able to back their lack of words up.  Phillip decided to arrive as an enemy and smashed the Spartans flat.  That rather spoils the story.  Reality does things like that.  Laconic doesn’t always win.