Be of few words: Her Majesty's war on verbosity - Christmas card stamp rates - A Christmas Note from Scotland - Column

Commonweal, Dec 17, 1993 by Deborah Smith Douglas

There I was, standing in fine at the post office again, my arms full of letters to send home to the U.S. from Scotland, when the hand-written notice caught my eye. Substantially reduced postal rates would be available for the holidays, the Royal Mail announced, for unsealed greeting cards containing no more than five words in addition to the printed message and the sender's name.

Five words? Five measly words? Heavens, why bother? I wondered to myself, rearranging the slippery stacks of thick (extra-postage-required) envelopes I was carrying. What on earth could one say that is worth saying in five words or less?

I beguiled my time in the queue by pondering this weighty question. "Merry Christmas - Happy New Year," would of course fit within the required brevity. But unless the card's printed message was more than usually beside the point, this would surely be redundant, as well as being rather obvious, and unimaginative in the extreme. There was the urgently telegraphic and classically melodramatic "All discovered - flee at once," moderately unorthodox as Christmas greetings go but unarguably five words. The awkwardly banal "All well here - how there?" also briefly occurred to me, but on the whole I felt the five-word limit reflected a stinginess unbecoming a Royal Mail, and dismissed the matter from my mind.

Then, unbidden, my memory produced the haunting final message of Etty Hillesum, scribbled on a scrap of paper and tossed from the window of a train bound for the death camps: "Tell them we left singing."

Five words. Five measly words. Containing whole worlds of sorrow, love, and courage.

So. Maybe it was possible to communicate meaningfully in five words or less. Christmas greetings aside, perhaps there were moments in human experience - and instances in the English language - where the mot juste was just five.

I posted my letters (paying a shocking penalty for the privilege of verbosity) and walked back across town, muttering to myself and counting on my fingers, intrigued as by a crossword puzzle by Her Britannic Majesty's pentagrammic challenge. I began rummaging in my rag-bag English-major mind for quotations, recalling Elizabeth Barrett Browning's parallel fives: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" (which would presumably have cost her double), and Emily Dickinson's succinct "I'm nobody - who are you?" I remembered Emilia's anguished "Who hath done this deed?" From Othello III:5, and Desdemona's dying (and even more condensed) reply: "Nobody: I myself Farewell."

I was hooked. All the rest of that day, and well into the following week, I found myself weighing the treasures of the English language in postal scales. I counted (under my breath) the words of my favorite poems, of famous quotes, of conversations overheard in the street.

Then I turned my search to Scripture, and was overwhelmed by fives. I was astounded to discover, leafing through my Bible, how many of the passages I had marked over the years happened to consist of five words. Many of the most powerful promises in all of Holy Writ are wholly writ in fives. (In English translation at any rate - whether the original Hebrew and Greek are even more austerely economical, I do not, alas, know.)

God's word to Moses by the fight of the burning bush, "I will be with you, "Jesus' triumphant "I have over come the world," and Mary Magdalene's ringing Easter witness "I have seen the Lord," all are cinquefoil, as it were.

So many of Jesus' words are familiar to us in clusters of five: "I am the good shepherd." "Your faith has healed you." "Rise and have no fear." "My peace I leave you." The Hebrew Scriptures as well bloom with five-petaled flowers: "I know you by name." "I will send an angel." "Love is strong as death." Similarly, the vision of Saint John at Patmos - the insight that "death shall be no more" - manages to express one of our faith's essential convictions in five little words. And there is the divine economy of "light shines in the darkness" and "This Jesus God raised up." Perhaps my own personal favorite - one wonder of brevity set like a gem in another - is: "Jesus said to her, |Mary."'

It is not only blessed assurance that comes in quinary, of course. Think of the serpent in Eden, beguiling Eve with "You will be like God." Or one of Abraham's least golden moments when, surrounded by lascivious Egyptians, he whispered to Sarah, "Say you are my sister."

Admonitions seem naturally to lend themselves to pentamerous compression: Scripture positively brims with five-leaved proverbs and aphorisms: "Go and sin no more," "Serve the Lord with gladness." Similarly, some of the most poignant prayers in the Bible consist of five words: "Lord have mercy upon me." "Make haste to help me." "I believe: help my unbelief." And Thomas's unforgettable, utterly unambiguous, "My Lord and my God."

Desolation as well seems to fit into quintupled phrases: the devastating "and they all forsook him" could be a Holy Week meditation all by itself; as of course could Jesus' cry from the cross: "Why hast Thou forsaken me?" And for me, one of the most perfect visual brushstrokes in the Gospels is the detail from the story of the disciples on the Emmaus road: "They stood still, looking sad."