Well
thought on: take my sword,
Give
it the captain.
-Edmund
King Lear Act V, scene iii, line 253
Okay, this is the last scene of the play. You want context?
I’ll give you context.
Everything is coming together here and Edmund (the bad brother)
has just turned good and he’s told Edgar (the good brother) to go run quick and
save Lear and Cordelia. It seems that Edmund sent them away with a captain and
he gave orders to the captain to kill Cordelia. So now he’s telling Edgar about
this and telling him to run and go stop the captain. Edgar says that he needs
some token to prove to the captain that Edmund has given the order to stop the
killing, and Edmund replies with today’s line. He gives Edgar his sword so that
Edgar can prove to the captain that the order came from Edmund.
There, that’s your context. Of course, we know (spoiler
alert) that Edgar will not arrive in time, and that Cordelia is already dead. Thought:
is it really necessary to note spoiler alerts for something that was written
four hundred years ago?
So then, what of it? What of today’s Totally Random line? How
about just the Well thought on part, or in other words, good idea. How
about if we stick with that one. Let’s see if we can’t supplant good idea
with well thought on. I think that might be interesting to try. You’ll
just have to remember the next time you’re thinking of replying with good idea.
‘What do think about going to the movies tonight?’
‘Well thought on!’
‘Huh?’
‘Well thought on. You know, good idea.’
‘Oh, yeah, right. So do you want to go or not?’
Yeah, this could be harder than I thought.
Okay, do you know what this is? It's some ancient Roman ruins in Merida Spain. And do you know what the white columns and modern structure is? It's the foundation of the apartment building that's directly above me. Yes, they found the ruins, but they wanted to build the apartment building anyway. So they did just that: they preserved the ruins and they built the apartments on top of them. Well thought on, eh?
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