It’s slightly ironic that English has so many words for “not so many words.” Someone who prefers to keep their verbal expressions to a minimum could be called “terse”, “brief”, “taciturn”, “curt”, “succinct”, “trenchant”, “pithy”, “laconic”, “brusque”, “gruff”, “brief”, ‘abrupt”, “short”, “bluff”, or — and this is probably the best one, even though nowadays it’s virtually disappeared — “pauciloquitious.”
“Pauciloquitious” has the additional ironic benefit of being a long word for something that’s more likely to be about short words. If someone is characterized by pauciloquy, they are “of few words,” and although it doesn’t necessarily follow, there’s at least a bit of an implication that those few words are fairly short. Although not necessarily from a vocabulary that doesn’t include “pauciloquy.”
It might not be fair to criticize someone’s vocabulary because it doesn’t include “pauciloquy;” after all hardly anybody knows the word at all and it doesn’t even appear in most modern dictionaries. It’s a compound word, formed from “paucity” (smallness of quantity), which is from the Latin word “paucus” for few, and “loquacity” (talkativeness), which is also from Latin: “loqui” (to speak of). “Pauciloquy” and “pauciloquitious” were in use back in the 1860s or so, when it seems like long words were more popular than they are today.
Back in the 1860s, one of the industries that was expanding at a great rate was railroading. There were a lot of new railroading innovations being introduced, and since this was happening in the era when people actually used words like pauciloquitious, you might think that the industry added some pretty impressive terms to its jargon.
But no, railroading is mostly a practical endeavor. Even though train engineers do have that traditional hat, most of railroading is “conducted” (heh) without a lot of concern for esthetics or style. So it turns out that railroading jargon is more associated with pauciloquy than with grandiloquence. You can see this in some of the terms invented for railroad machines. Some freight cars are open-topped and carry ore, coal, or any kind of loose material that’s dumped in from the top. To empty the cars when they reach their destination, there’s an enormous machine that picks the entire car up and turns it over. The machine is called, laconically enough, a “car dumper.” When new tracks are laid, they have to be pretty level, because a train can’t handle much of a hill. Thus sometimes they need to excavate a hill keep the track level. That’s just called a “cut”. And when the ground needs to be brought up higher, it’s simply a “fill.”
Like people’s English vocabularies in the 1900s, steam locomotives are complex and can contain more than a million separate parts. But since it’s all railroad equipment, most of those parts are simply called “gear”, “tube”, “wheel”, “piston”, and so forth. The “romance of the rails” is, alas, not built on syllables. Very pauciloquitious.
