It was terse and elegiac.
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.
In so many of his entries (remember, he liked to do 15 parishes a day), it was terse, clipped, abbreviated: a nondescript Wesleyan chapel on the Lancashire moors would be described as "Built 1767.
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.
It is terse, direct and, as probably befits the son of a professional soldier, disciplined.
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.
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".
There is, third, the conventional form belonging to the epitaph and reflecting back to antiquity; it is terse enough to be cut in stone and tight-lipped also, perhaps for other reasons, such as the speaker's shame.
It is terse and elegant, with a minimal amount of horns and extraneous elements; Ms. O'Connor's undisguised Irish accent and obvious conviction make it an imposing act of pop interpretation.
In 1969, at the age of fifty-two, she released "Watch What Happens," an album recorded with the late, great Hungarian guitarist Gabor Szabo, which includes the oddest, most abstract version of the Beatles tune "Rocky Raccoon" you might ever hear: it is terse, dismissive, filled with nearly wry contempt.
It's not that she was terse or tetchy; she answered every question, mostly at decent-enough length, and got evasive only once or twice.
