Deep Thoughts Explained

When I first had the idea for the Deep Thoughts posts, I thought it would be cool to mine movie lines and poems and song lyrics, things of that nature, for sections that both made sense and fit the constraints of the Deep Thoughts scheme. That wasn’t what wound up happening, of course; but it occurred to me, while I was working on this one, that I never precisely explained the scheme behind the Deep Thoughts posts. I made a passing reference to the idea in the first Deep Thoughts post, but I never went back and laid it all out at any point after that. I just kept posting them, and that was around the time that people stopped commenting, so I never made it much of a priority to go back and explain it once I had gotten started.

With this last post, however, I have sallied forth into the gloomy fens of copyright, and ought probably to disclaim the words set forth therein as mine own. (Oy. I started reading a book about Shakespeare, by Harold Bloom, the other night. It’s eight or nine hundred pages long. I hope that’s not a glimpse of things to come.) The Deep Thoughts posts are, for the most part, exercises; and they adhere to a few simple rules.

The first rule is that they are comprised of complete sentences. The second is that they do not use numerals or single letters to truncate actual words in order to save space. There can be a species of cleverness to that, but I am not about to mine the daily output of tweets for the handful of needles there might be in that Everest of a haystack. The third rule, which is the most critical—the only one I won’t bend—is that they all contain exactly 140 characters. I don’t know if there’s any official way to verify that or not, but that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. You should be able to cut and paste the text of the Deep Thought from your browser into the word processing program of your choice and then use the word count feature to verify the number of characters.

I am given to understand that Twitter has a limit of 140 characters per tweet. I don’t know how they arrived at that number, and I don’t know whether or not it’s challenging to compose actual tweets that stay within that limit. It is, however, fairly challenging to compose a fake tweet that is exactly 140 characters—and adheres to the complete sentence and complete word rules. I have abandoned many a fake tweet because I simply could not get the whole thought down without going beyond 140 characters.

I also don’t know how many of my fake tweets would fail to make the cut as real tweets because of the links I have included. I know they have those micro-URLs, or whatever, but even those take up more space than a link that you include by way of editing the HTML code from within Blogger. I don’t know if you can edit code from within Twitter or not, although I sort of suspect that the existence of micro-URLs means that you cannot.

The titles, of course, come from the Saturday Night Live bit from way back in the day.