In the past years I have spent much of my time writing what in the end has become a very long book about very short words. What has emerged is a complex, but also a clear and empirically founded picture of the structural properties of English tr- cated words as well as an optimality-theoretic model of these properties in the research tradition of Prosodic Morphology. These will be of use to linguists int- ested in the structure of English as well...