pithy

adj

1. Concise and meaningful.

   “Mr. Lamb, on the contrary, being "native to the manner here," though he too has borrowed from previous sources, instead of availing himself of the most popular and admired, has groped out his way, and made his most successful researches among the more obscure and intricate, though certainly not the least pithy or pleasant of our writers.”

   “The following passage, which is exquisitely pithy and exquisitely modest, winds up the description:- "In this apparatus there is nothing new but its simplicity and thorough trustworthiness."”

   “IT was a pithy saying that of Lorenzo de' Medici, and true as pithy, that we are enjoined to forgive our enemies, but nowhere are we told that we should forgive our friends.”

   “[…], a guy w/o sunglasses or hauteur who throws open the pressurized doors to the Dreamward’s Bridge and galley and Vacuum Sewage System and personally takes me through, offering pithy and quotable answers to questions before I’ve even asked them.”

2. Of, like, or abounding in pith; spongy or having small holes or pits.

   “1863, Theodore Winthrop, “The Heart of the Andes”, Part 2 – Introduction, published posthumously in Life in the Open Air and other papers, Must we know the torrid zone only through travelled bananas, plucked too soon and pithy? or by bottled anacondas? or by the tarry-flavored slang of forecastle-bred paroquets?”

   “1910, Liberty Hyde Bailey, Manual of Gardening, Suggestions and Reminders I: For the North, April, Parsnip.—Dig the roots before they grow and become soft and pithy.”

   “To summarize the characters of a true mushroom - it grows only in pastures; it is of small size, dry, and with unchangeable flesh; the cap has a frill; the gills are free from the stem, the spores brown-black or deep purple-black in colour, and the stem solid or slightly pithy.”

3. (Scotland, archaic)Vigorous, powerful, strong; substantial.

   “His bairns a’ before the flood / Had langer tack o’ fleſh and blood, / And on mair pithy ſhanks they ſtood / Than Noah’s line, / Wha ſtill hae been a feckleſs brood / Wi’ drinking wine.”

   “Next, from the well-air’d ancient town of Crail, / Go out her craftsmen with tumultuous din, / Her wind-bleach’d fishers, garrulous and thin; / And some are flush’d with horns of pithy ale, […]”

   “Great freshwater lakes sweep away inland from the very verge of the sea, parted from them only by pebble-banks and ridge of shingle—a sea without rocks or cliff, but the worst in England for shipwrecks—all shoals as far as you can see—water thick and pithy with sand.”