Is there such thing as being overly-concise??

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A While ago in the course of my day, was speaking to my boss. I (a secretary) was telling her of a phone conversation I had with a secretary of another company. I mentioned this secretary's name, (Marjorie) and said off handedly "which isn't a name any human should have" to which my boss started laughing. I asked her why she was laughing assuming she was laughing either nervously, or because she agreed, I presumed it wasn't out of finding humor it what I said because although I do make jokes, at that time I was simply stating an opinion. She said she was laughing at how I said it, "any human" instead of any person or any female should have. She said I was being overly-concise. However I wasn't going to rule out that it might make a good name for an object such as a brand of margarine, or an animal, a female dog that is yellow perhaps. However I thought regardless of the gender of the person that Marjorie was a bad name for a human. My question for you all is simply is there such thing as being overly-concise?? Wouldn’t that be oxymoronic? To be concise though it is a goal can only be reached relatively. What may be considered concise to one might not be to another. However isn't it impossible to be overly-concise because if you were in some way overly-concise it would mean that you were obfuscating or blurring the statement? I explained this to her and she said "You just don't get it"; and now it was my turn to chuckle (of agreement) for she was completely correct; I don't get it.

Mark T. Pierce

no there is not, your boss is just being an idiot

I think you were actually making a generalisation (the opposite of overly-concise) with your "human" remark:)))) Concise would have been if you would have said "any secretary"..a smaller group. Instead you made it about the entire human race. Hihiiiii


btw, NOT a nice comment about that woman's name. Actually quite offensive. Especially when you share this impression with another WOMAN, who might then wonder if that's what you think about her name too

Concise is about the number of words, not about the concepts contained within them. Precise is the word for a narrower and more accurate concept. Concise means, basically, short, using few words.

All of the following are just as concise as each other:

* which isn't a name any human should have
* which isn't a name any secretary should have
* which isn't a name any person should have
* which isn't a name any female should have

Less concise ways of saying it include:

* and I don't think that's a name any human being should have
* that's not really a name that any human being should have
* and I don't think that's really a name anyone should have, do you?

More concise ways of saying it include:

* Nobody should be named that.
* which is a bad name.
* Nobody should have that name.

I know this because in writing class I was always told I was too concise. (Which might come as a surprise to anyone who sees my verboseness in writing now. It was partly a trouble with giving explanations, which I later figured out how to do. And it was partly that writing had to be handwritten, which I find excruciating.)

Yes

No

Anbuend is right. Overly concise would have to be expressing an idea in too few words. It can't be that there were so few words that some of the idea is missing, that's not concise, that's missing things. So the 'overly' must refer to information packed so densely into a sentence that it becomes hard to process/understand.

That doesn't sound like what you did at all though, I think your boss was using 'concise' wrongly.