To Make a Short Story Long

I’ve been thinking that there are some everyday sayings that we may need to revisit because they have become completely pointless. The first saying up for nomination is “To Make a Long Story Short….” I recently had someone at work relay a story to me that took them over an hour to tell. Within the span of that one hour he said “to make a long story short” four times. To clarify, there were not multiple stories within stories that he was telling me. There was just one story. As a rule of thumb I am suggesting that if you are telling a story and at some point within a story you realize you’ve said “To Make a long story short” four times, your story is officially no longer short and it’s never going to be. To be fair, I didn’t have a problem with the fact that the story took an hour to tell. What I did have a problem with was the continuing promise of a short story that never materialized. The other reason this saying is pointless is that if you do have a long story that you’re planning on making short, there’s no need to announce it. Just do it and we’ll figure it out.

Another one of my personal favourites is “No offence”. It’s used all too frequently as an attempt to cushion the blow of something that is invariably quite offensive. For example – “No offence but are you partially retarded? No seriously, did your mother drop you on your head as a child?” OR “It’s really not that surprising that you’re single. No offence.”

This isn’t a completely useless saying however. If used prior to an offensive comment it does give the person on the receiving end fair warning of the impending offensive comment which can be slightly helpful. However, I am suggesting a replacement saying that I think is a little more to the point and will still serve the same purpose. Instead of saying “No offence” before we offend someone, I’m suggesting we just say “Attention. I’m about to say something quite hurtful that will probably scar you for life”. This allows the person on the receiving end a bit of a heads up and at the very least affords them the opportunity to make a run for it or club the offending party in the knee, if they so choose.

A couple of other quick ones:

“There are no stupid questions.” Yeah, there are. A stupid person with a lot of stupid questions came up with this saying.

“It’s always the last place you look isn’t it?” Of course it is. Why would I keep looking for something once I’ve found it?

“It’s the thought that counts.” Yeah sorry, wrong again. It’s actually been proven mathematically: Thinking - Action = Useless. I could be wrong. That is if you’ve had any success with this line: “I thought about getting you a trip to Paris for your birthday but I hope you like this paperweight instead.” Let me know how that one works out for you.