I’ve decided to take up flogging.

A flog is a blog entry that’s less than 500 words. A flog is a flash blog. The world craves to be flogged and good floggers are always in short supply.

Now, ‘flog’ does have another meaning; it’s how the British transmitted seat-of-the-pants know-how. The battle of Waterloo was supposedly won on the schooldesks at Rugby. Possibly. But I am not talking about that kind of flogging.

A flog is a brief, terse, precis of a summary. The 0.5K limit is necessary. Tolstoy’s idea of an epilogue resulted in a 28 chapter addendum to War and Peace. The arm neither aches nor does the sweat drip, but the satisfaction, I assure you, is still exquisitely pink and equally addictive.

A lot can be said in 500 words. The Gettysburg Address is under 300 words.  My favorite example of a perfect tale is a mere 412 words. And obviously, my favorite language, English, was designed by floggers; the larger the concept, the smaller the tag. Consider: Life. God. Good. Evil. Die. YHWH. TAO. Yet. No. Text.
Sex. And oh yeah, Fuck. 

Shakespeare — not exactly a flogger — posed one of the deepest questions ever with small words: "To Be Or Not
To Be?" John Steinbeck wrote a 350,000 word answer which boiled down to this one word: timshel. Roughly, Hebrew for: may be.

So: no more 6,000 word masterpieces on the smells listed in Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava or the smells not listed in Jayarasi’s Tattvopaplavasimha. No more moody Borgesian reveries on the Tantric significance of the loincloth or on the origin of laughter amongst the Parsis. No more pedantic 10K expositions on the market for merkins or on equal rights for mammose women.

I think it was Bruce Sterling who said–

See! I would’ve finished that quote in the past. Not now. Who cares what Sterling said? A flogger
doesn’t have the luxury of considering what Sterling said or didn’t say. Floggers have to watch their keystrokes.

So here are some ground rules for a legit flog. Under 0.5K words of course. Use small words rather than big sesquipedalian ones. A picture may be worth ten thousand words Larkin,
Jill H. and Herbert A. Simon. 1987. "Why a Diagram is (Sometimes) Worth
Ten Thousand Words." Cognitive Science 11(1):65-99.† but we’ll ignore them. Words in footnotes count. Comments, however, will not be included in the flog count. Plastic cups will be provided.

Seriously, who has the time to read the 365 chapters of War And Peace? The Bible and the Vedas haven’t been read for centuries; had readers been flogged, who knows? The future belongs to floggers.

Flog it, I say.