Terse Talker
"Talk excessive. Time limited"—Omega Supreme, Transformers
Character talks in shorthand. Often avoids "being" verbs. Often due to keeping journal. Makes character more distinctive/memorable. Annoying to some. Prone to Punctuated! For! Emphasis!.
Contrast Motor Mouth. Compare Beige Prose.
Comic Books
- Rorschach from Watchmen is always like this when talking, but his journal and internal monologue switches between this and outbreaks of fluency. Still skips articles and pronouns in journal.
"Stood in firelight sweltering. Blood spreading on chest like map of violent new continent."
- The Surgeon General from Give Me Liberty talks in exactly the same way as Rorschach.
- The "That Yellow Bastard" yarn of Sin City starts with Hartigan's introduction: "One hour to go. Last day on the job. Not my idea. Doctor's orders. Heart condition. Angina, he calls it."
Fan Fiction
- As a consequence of being modeled on Bridget Jones's Diary, Cassandra Clare's The Very Secret Diaries and all their numerous parodies and imitations.
Literature
- Bridget Jones's Diary. It has this in common with Rorschach's journal.
- Zueb Zan in Legacy Of Force books does this.
- The Weaver from Perdido Street Station.
- Candy and her journal entries in David R. Palmer's novel Emergence.
- In the original French and Matthew Ward's popular English translation, the narrator of The Stranger talks like this.
- The narration of "This Is The Title Of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times In The Story Itself" by David Moser slips into this periodically:
"Introduces, in this paragraph, the device of sentence fragments. A sentence fragment. Another. Good device. Will be used more later."
- Eustace Scrubb writes like this in his journal entries.
- Mac in The Dresden Files hoards words. he almost never speaks in complete sentences, usually limiting his communication to single words or phrases. In Changes, when Harry explains that his daughter has been kidnapped, the event is so shocking that Mac actually speaks an entire paragraph.
- Ulath in the Sparhawk series. Often will sum up a complex idea with one word and let others figure it out.
- Evelyn Howard from Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles. As narrator Hastings puts it, her speech is "couched in the telegraphic style."
Live Action TV
- Oz on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Witness this exchange from "The Zeppo":
Xander: What is it? How do you get it? Who doesn't have it, and who decides who doesn't have it? What is the essence of 'cool'?
Oz: Not sure.
Xander: I mean, you yourself, Oz, are considered more or less 'cool'. Why is that?
Oz: Am I?
Xander: Is it about the talking? You know, the-the way you tend to express yourself in short, non-committal phrases?
Oz: Could be.
Angel: Oz.
Oz: Hey.
Angel: Nice surprise.
Oz: Thanks.
Angel: Staying long?
Oz: Few days.
Doyle: Are they always like this?
Oz: No, we're usually laconic.
Real Life
- Former Russian finance minister turned newspaper columnist A. Lifshits is known (in Russia) for his frequent use of this in speeches and articles. It looks pretty much like this:
"Russia's economy is bad. Really. Very bad. It's a pity. Because of communists. Soviet apparatchiks. Still many of them. Too many. That's a shame."
- Many accounts of messages sent by military commanders engaged in combat, sometimes due to needing to keep it brief so they could focus on the fighting, and sometimes because the nature of how the messages were sent (telegraph, flag signals, etc.) tended to favor brief messages.
- "Veni, vidi, vici."[1] - Gaius Julius Caesar
- Succinct, to be sure, but not as fragmentary as it appears in English as Latin does not use tend to use pronouns to denote subjects.
- Caesar overall might still count, though; his style of writing in his military commentaries, at least, was famously straightforward to the point, at times, of litotes, which goes some way to explain the texts' enduring popularity as fairly basic-level reading material in the instruction of Latin today.
- American President Calvin Coolidge was known as "Silent Cal" among Washington society. A possibly apocryphal story has it that Dorothy Parker, seated next to him at a dinner, said to him, "Mr. Coolidge, I've made a bet against a fellow who said it was impossible to get more than two words out of you."
Coolidge: "You lose."
Coolidge: "Fuck you"
Video Games
- Final Fantasy VIII: In the original Japanese script, Fujin's dialogue boxes only contain single Kanji symbols. The English translation copes with this by having her speak IN ALL CAPITALS, and in sentences one or two words in length. In both cases she drops the shtick at the end of the game when she pleads Seifer to turn back and abandon his insane crusade.
- Professor Mordin Solus of Mass Effect 2, who paradoxically combines this with Motor Mouth. Except when he sings.
- Dee Vasquez in the first Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney speaks almost exclusively in short sentences. This can make it difficult to get any information from her in the cross-examination.
- Agent Superball from the Telltale Sam and Max Freelance Police games does it all the time.
- In Fallout: New Vegas, one of the Courier's companions, Boone, will alternate between this method of speech and speaking in complete sentences. These also tie in to the two personalities he displays in the course of conversations with him—the classic Cold Sniper and a more emotional, generally decent, but heavily traumatized man who just happens to be one of the most lethal people in the Mojave.
- Sten in Dragon Age.
Warden: Tell me about the qunari.
Sten: No.
Web Comics
- It happens sometimes in Penny Arcade when they make a joke that falls short of expectations, and they try to explain it in sentence fragments.
- Zz'dtri from The Order of the Stick, Evil Counterpart to Vaarsuvius, never speaks in complete sentences.
Vaarsuvius: BURN, you insufferably terse dullard!
Web Original
- IT-HE Software does this with Am-Shaegar's diary.
Western Animation
- In Justice League Unlimited, the Question, Rorschach's reverse-double-Expy, does this when he's figuring out the conspiracy and hadn't slept in days. "Not alternate universe. Time loop!"
- Characters who don't ordinarily exhibit this trope will sometimes do so when injured or fatigued, as in this example from an old Transformers G1 episode:
Optimus Prime: "Badly damaged. Losing energy rapidly. Power relays fused. Mobility limited. Part replacement essential."
- A trope which is parodied by The Simpsons.
Comic Book Guy: Unable... To continue... Describing... Symptoms... *collapses*
- Omega Supreme from the G1 Transformers cartoon. Just about everything he ever said were two-word sentences, on the order of noun-adjective ("Repairs complete. Disaster averted.")
- Omega tends to do this in many incarnations. As does Soundwave.
Ginormous, homage-tastically recolored virtual Soundwave: ESCAPE IS IMPOSSIBLE. AUTOBOTS INFERIOR, SOUNDWAVE SUPERIOR.
- ↑ "I came, I saw, I conquered."