Laconic Wit.
I’m teaching my world history students about Philip II of Macadon today, and soon I’ll be teaching about Alexander the Great.
On most days I arrive to work eary so that I can re-fresh / re-learn about the people, places, and things that I plan to teach about that day. I do some Google searches, read the Wikipedia, and read relvant sections of various books I keep in my classroom. It is sort of like a cram session before a big test, but rather than taking a test I teach the stuff.
As I was doing the wikipedia section of my cram session I found this really cool story about Philip II and Sparta. Here is the short version.
Philip II was moving from the North to the South taking over Greek city states like it was going out of style. Sparta is in the South so it was going to be one of the last places that he would arrive. Before getting to Sparta Philip II sent the rulers of Sparta a note saying that he was heading for Laconia (the section of Greece that Sparta was in).
“If I enter Laconia, I will level Sparta to the ground,”
The Spartans read the note and sent back their one word reply…
“If.”
The Wikipedia called this reply Laconic Wit which is “a figure of speech in which someone uses very few words to express an idea… This may be used for efficiency… for philosophical reasons (especially among thinkers who believe in minimalism, such as Stoics), or for better disarming a long, pompous speech.”
Another example of this is from the Battle of Thermopylae
A Persian ambassador asked the Spartan leader Leonidas to command his troops to surrender their arms. To this Leonidas gave his famous answer: Μολὼν λαβέ (pronounced [moˈlɔːn laˈbe]) “Come and get them”.
Awesome.
-N
