the.com/gist
The whole story stripped to the one sentence that actually mattered.
means The central point or essential meaning of something — what it boils down to once you cut away the rest.
from From Anglo-French legal jargon: the phrase 'cest action gist' meant 'this action lies' (i.e., has grounds), built on the Old French 'gist,' a form of 'gésir,' to lie or rest — a cousin of Latin 'iacēre,' 'to lie down.' Lawyers spoke of the point on which a case 'lay' or rested, and by the 1700s that resting-point had loosened into the general sense of the heart of any matter.
- legal roots
- Once meant the essential point a lawsuit rested on
- from latin
- Traces to jacere, to lie or rest somewhere
- attention span
- What survives when nobody reads past paragraph one
- github cousin
- GitHub borrowed it for tiny shared code snippets
gist of appeal — legal term used in appeals courts to identify the essential point of a case
gist of the colloquy — journalism term for the main point extracted from an interview or conversation