“I write long because I am short of time,” admitted Erasmus of Rotterdam in a letter to a friend. The decision by Twitter to set a 10,000-character limit may be a concession to hurried users unable to sum up their messages or, on the contrary, an acknowledgment that some messages may well deserve more than 140 characters. Borges used to say that one day perhaps we will coin one word that may sum up the body of knowledge and history of the entire universe. Until that day comes, we will have to use more, whether it be two or ten thousand.
