>what on earth can you say in 144 characters of less that has any gravity at all
A lot. We had an example here yesterday: 'He that sells what isn't his'n buys it back or goes to prison."
Reading books like Liar's Poker or Barbarians at the Gates, you get the idea that if business and finance people weren't good at pithy one-liners they'd never get anything done. And they obviously get a lot done.
And who can forget Henny Youngman and Rodney Dangerfield?
A few years ago Luc Sante put together a collection called Novels in Three Lines. It's hundreds of short entries published in a French newspaper from 1906. Taken together they become something rich and strange. There's a piece of a review below and some excerpts. Many more excerpts at the npr link.
http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/novels-in-three-lines/
Novels in Three Lines collects more than a thousand items that appeared anonymously in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906—true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life presented with a ruthless economy that provokes laughter even as it shocks. This extraordinary trove, undiscovered until the 1940s and here translated for the first time into English, is the work of the mysterious Félix Fénéon. Dandy, anarchist, and critic of genius, the discoverer of Georges Seurat and the first French publisher of James Joyce, Fénéon carefully maintained his own anonymity, toiling for years as an obscure clerk in the French War Department. Novels in Three Lines is his secret chef-d’oeuvre, a work of strange and singular art that brings back the long-ago year of 1906 with the haunting immediacy of a photograph while looking forward to such disparate works as Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the Death and Disaster series of Andy Warhol.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17138822
M. Jonnart denied to the commission that the new tax plan was a scheme to make the budget's ends meet.
A criminal virago, Mlle Tulle, was sentenced by the Rouen court to 10 years' hard labor, while her lover got five.
Because of his poster opposing the strikebreakers, the students of Brest lycee hissed their teacher, M. Litalien, an aide to the mayor.
Nurse Elise Bachmann, whose day off was yesterday, put on a public display of insanity.
A complaint was sworn by the Persian physician Djai Khan against a compatriot who had stolen from him a tiara.
A dozen hawkers who had been announcing news of a nonexistent anarchist bombing at the Madeleine have been arrested.
A certain madwoman arrested downtown falsely claimed to be nurse Elise Bachmann. The latter is perfectly sane.
On Place du Pantheon, a heated group of voters attempted to roast an effigy of M. Auffray, the losing candidate. They were dispersed.
Arrested in Saint-Germain for petty theft, Joël Guilbert drank sublimate. He was detoxified, but died yesterday of delirium tremens.
The photographer Joachim Berthoud could not get over the death of his wife. He killed himself in Fontanay-sous-Bois.
Reverend Andrieux, of Roannes, near Aurillac, whom a pitiless husband perforated Wednesday with two rifle shots, died last night.