Cardinal Richelieu lived during the time of the 3 musketeers. He was a master statesman and is considered the first prime minister there ever was. I read that he once said that if a man will write but three lines, he, Richelieu, would have him convicted of treason. He meant that with no more than that, he or his assistants could find an interpretation of the three lines that would be enough to convict the writer of treason.
If you are looking for a book to give you a feel for the power of word-twisting and lawyer's skills in that area, I recommend Christopher Buckley's "No Way to Treat a First Lady". Her boyfriend is a good example of the sleaze, the poet, the brain, the showman who, combined in a single man, is a force to reckon with in a courtroom.
Richelieu's boast reminds me of school assignments and Twitter. Our society, like many others, realizes that effort is an important variable in life. So, we encourage it or even require it. We get school assignments to write 500 words or 50 pages or some other specified length, almost always more than a student would produce without the specification for lots of word or many pages. Since many people have slaved to create the required lengths, I like to keep my eye open for the power of short, little things.
It has been fun to ask intelligent, hard-working, honest students to produce only a single sentence for a given assignment. Or, just a single word. Given a chance, they can produce some very imaginative work. Poets know the power of the right word. I like Ogden Nash's ending of "The Panther", "When called by a panther, don't anther."
Twitter, which I have not visited so far, limits posts to 140 characters. It is true that many report 'tweets' that are trivial but doubling the limit or multiply it by 10 or 100 does not guarantee that the quality or usefulness of them would be enhanced. But scientists are reported to be using Twitter to communicate research results to each other successfully.
AARP's six-word memoir work is another aspect of the power of poetry and wordwork.
Short, clear messages can be fun to create and to use, even though they may open you to charges of treason.
