It took the founding fathers just 1,330 words to declare independence from England. But at last night's GOP debates, the candidates spent 38 times as many words trying to differentiate themselves from the 15-person pack. Here's a chart that breaks it all down.
The full transcript of the "undercard" debate weighed in at just under 16,000 words. That's just a few thousand words less than the word count of the bible's Book of Leviticus.
The mainstage debate transcript, however, came in at nearly 35,000 words. That's longer than Hamlet. It's longer than the Book of Genesis. It's just about as long as Old Yeller, and by the end of it many of us were hoping that Travis Coates would come along and put us out of our misery, too.
Taken together, the two debates took nearly 5 hours and clocked in at just over 50,000 words spoken. It took F. Scott Fitzgerald fewer words to write the great American novel. Kurt Vonnegut was more concise when he chronicled the horrors of World War II. 50,000 words is longer than Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest -- combined.
And if that wasn't enough for you, chin up -- only 40 days until the next GOP debate.