Have you ever seen SQL? Blowing lots of bytes on a query was not a concern. They could have made a much more compact syntax with little effort, but it wouldn't have looked kind of like English the way SQL does.

You could imagine a world where instead of:

SELECT ( email, name, outstanding_balance ) FROM accounts WHERE outstanding_balance > 0 AND last_payment > 60 ORDER BY name

the queries looked more like:

accounts: outstanding_balance > 0 & last_payment > 60 => email, ^name, outstanding_balance

There were plenty of contemporary languages that looked like the latter, but few survive to this day. SQL's relative verbosity was not seen as a problem then and is definitely not one today.

Besides, if the verbosity was a problem they could easily shorten it to UNK. That would have been perfectly normal.