Analyzing Will Ferrell's "I Thought" joke


I'm reading Will Ferrell's Twitter where he wrote



Just thought a thought but the thought I thought wasn't the thought I thought I thought.



Does the sentence still have the same meaning if you remove the last "I thought"?


Is this grammatical word play possible with other words?


Is there a name for this other than a play on words?



Answer



The best way to understand something like this is to replace each occurrence of the repeated word with either a synonym, or something that matches its part of speech:



Just came up with an idea, but the idea I came up with wasn't the idea I believed I came up with.



As you can see, removing the last "I thought" either changes the meaning, or results in a contradiction:




  • Just came up with an idea, but the idea I came up with wasn't the idea I believed – inventing an idea you don't believe is quite different from misremembering what idea you invented.




  • Just came up with an idea, but the idea I came up with wasn't the idea I came up with – this is a contradiction, and doesn't make a lot of sense. (Well, not that the original makes a whole lot of sense, either.)




I don't know if there's an official term for this sort of phrase. Depending on the repeated word, it could be considered a tongue-twister. For the famous buffalo example mentioned by MrHen in the comments, Wikipedia just says it's "an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs."


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