How can I hardcode the categories sidebox?

I would like to give my subcategories long descriptive names so that the title of the page is as descriptive as possible. I would like to do it this way instead of spending a lot of time altering the meta tags.

The problem is if I use too long of a subcategory name the sidebox looks bad.
What would I have to do to hard code the sidebar categories instead of it being created dynamically. This way I can give shorter names for the user to click on. I think it should have something to do with tpl_categories.

Thanks for any help you can offer.