It's the Word of the Day podcast for January 31st.

Today's word is short shrift, spelled as two words, S-H-O-R-T, S-R-I-F-T.

Short-Srift is a noun. It means little or no attention or thought or quick work.

In religious use, it refers to barely adequate time for confession before execution.

Here's the word used in a sentence from nola.com.

Charlie Kaplanger echoed the concerns of many speakers at the meeting with charter captains

saying the recreational fishing industry's economic contributions were being given short shrift.

We've got a confession to make, but we'll keep it brief. While it's technically possible to make long shrift of something,

you're unlikely to find long shrift in our dictionary anytime soon. Short shrift, on the other hand,

has been keeping it real, real terse, that is, for centuries. The earliest known use of the phrase

comes from Shakespeare's play, Richard III, in which Lord Hastings,

who has been condemned by King Richard to be beheaded, is told by Sir Richard Radcliffe

to make a short shrift, as the king longs to see your head. Although now archaic, the noun

shrift was understood in Shakespeare's time, to refer to the confession or absolution of sins,

so to make a short shrift meant quite literally to keep your confession short.

However, since at least the 19th century, the phrase has been used figuratively, to refer to a small or inadequate amount of time or attention given to something.

With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.

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