Q: I think you can say, “The new bits last longer than the old bits,” but you can’t say, “The new bits last shorter than the old bits.” Why is that?
A: The words “short” and “long” are sometimes antonyms and sometimes not, often depending on whether they’re adjectives or adverbs.
As adjectives, they’re usually antonyms, so one could describe a drill bit as “short,” “shorter,” or “shortest” as well as “long,” “longer,” or “longest.”
But as adverbs, “short” and “long” generally aren’t opposites. For example, “short” can mean soon (“I’ll be there shortly”), abruptly or quickly (“He stopped short”), and unprepared (“He was caught short”).
And the adverb “long” can refer to a specific period (“He worked all summer long”), a significant distance (“Do you have to travel long to get there?”), and beyond a certain time (“I can’t stay longer”).
So it’s not unusual that only one of the adverbs works with the verb “last,” as in your example—something can “last longer” but it can’t “last shorter.”
In fact, the adjectives “short” and “long” aren’t always opposites either. “Short,” for example, can mean insufficiently supplied (“She was short of cash”), abrupt or curt (“He was short with her and she was even shorter in replying”), and quick or efficient (“They made short work of it”).
And “long” can mean speculative (“It was a long guess”), a specific length (“The rug was six feet long”), at great odds (“She took a long chance when she married me”), and a specific duration (“The speech was two hours long”).
But in the financial sense, the two adverbs can still be antonyms: when you “sell short” you think an asset’s price will fall in value over time, and when you “sell long” you think it will rise in value.
And of course “short” and “long” have various other senses as nouns and verbs, such as “shorts” (short pants or underpants), an electrical “short” (short circuit), to “short” out, and to “long” (feel a strong desire) for someone or something.
As for their etymologies, “short” and “long” both appeared in Old English as adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs. The first citations in the Oxford English Dictionary are for the adjectives (sceortne and langne), words inherited from prehistoric Germanic.
The OED’s first “short” citation, which uses the term in the distance sense, is from the Old English Boethius, a late ninth- or early tenth-century translation of De Consolatione Philosophiae (“The Consolation of Philosophy”), a sixth-century Latin treatise by the Roman philosopher Boethius:
“Forþy hi habbað swa sceortne ymbhwyrft” (“Therefor they [some stars] have so short a circuit”). The passage refers to the ancient belief that the stars and other celestial bodies traveled around a stationary earth.
The first “long” example is from Daniel, an anonymous poem based loosely on the biblical Book of Daniel. This passage refers to the journey of the ancient Israelites into exile in Babylonia after the army of King Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in the sixth century BC:
“Gelæddon eac on langne sið Israela cyn, on eastwegas to Babilonia” (“They [Nebuchadnezzar’s troops] led the people of Israel on a long journey over the eastward roads to Babylonia”).
We should mention here that the title of our post, “the short and the long,” is an early version of the more common expression “the long and the short.”
When “the short and (the) long” first appeared in the 15th century, the OED says, it referred to “all that can or need be said; the summation, total, substance, or essence of the subject under discussion; the upshot.”
The dictionary’s first citation is from “The Merchant and His Son,” an anonymous poem written sometime before 1500: “Y wolde have the [thee] a man of lawe, thys ys the schorte and longe.” From Remains of Early Popular Poetry of England (1864), edited by William Carew Hazlitt.
And here’s a better known example from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, probably written in the late 16th century: “He loves your wife; there’s the short and the long.” (Nym, a servant of Falstaff, is speaking here to the husband of Mistress Page.)
The OED says the reverse expression, “the long and (the) short of (it, etc.),” had a similar meaning when it appeared in the 17th century: “But to the purpose here’s the long and short ont” (from Sir Gregory Nonsence His Newes From No Place, 1622, by John Taylor).
Finally, here’s the dictionary’s latest example of the usage: “The long and the short of it will be that for weeks on end everybody will be offended with everybody else to the point that no one will be speaking to anyone.” From His Current Woman (2002), Bill Johnston’s translation of Inne Rozkosze (“Other Pleasures”), a novel by the Polish writer Jerzy Pilch.
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