“to make a long story short” - especially when used multiple times in one story and/or as a mindless audiospace filler to hold control of the conversation while assembling more thoughts/words… without knowing both the long and short version it literally adds nothing to the communication, it literally makes the story longer every time you use it (wasting my time), it’s probably the longest socially acceptable way to say that (one could just say: “in short”), and it’s got just enough word-scramble verbal complexity to occupy the higher order English parsing logic.