make a long story short

Example: “To make a long story short, we missed the ferry and slept on the beach.”

Origin: Its real origin is genuinely unknown, and the earliest documented appearance already treats it as an overused cliché rather than a fresh coinage: a 1729 issue of The Intelligencer, a Dublin periodical produced by Jonathan Swift and Thomas Sheridan, lists it among a set of "trite phrases" already worn smooth from repetition. That places its actual origin well before 1729, though how much earlier is impossible to say. Henry David Thoreau played on the same underlying joke without using the fixed phrase itself, writing in an 1857 letter that "the story need [not] be long, but it will take a long time to make it short" — a wry acknowledgment that real brevity is often harder to achieve than length. The now more common variant, "cut a long story short," swaps in a more physically vivid verb but appears to be a later reworking of the original "make" version.