First put together in the 7th or 8th century, it is striking chiefly for its terse vividness.
It's a brilliant small poem which packs immensities into its terse quatrains.
But beyond the calls heralding the mobile Internet, anyone who has tried to type an e-mail message on a cell phone knows how necessarily terse it must be.
Adam Liptak writes that the United States Constitution has fallen out of fashion as a model because it "is terse and old, and it guarantees relatively few rights".
After decades of litigation, the final legal ruling allowing the execution of Troy Davis was a one-sentence order from the United States Supreme Court so terse that it could have fit neatly into a Twitter message with room to spare.
Though it is terse and punchy, its judgmental appearance in a headline is to be (to use the favorite verbs in headlinese) assailed and decried.
At its best, it has distant echoes of early Hemingway, as filtered through Twitter and Klonopin: it's terse, neutral, composed of small and often intricate gestures.
It wasn't a guitar hero's display of technique for self-glorification; it was terse bits of guidance and exhortation, sharp nudges, a few glints of steel shown as necessary.
It was terse and elegiac.
It features terse, crackling reportage, with echoes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
