“How long is a piece of string?” is a question intended to end further questioning, as nothing specific is left to answer. Indeed, I may have asked it to myself to stop deliberating on what topic to discuss here.
As an idiom, it is used where an item, or a thought, has no finite length or end point - you could continue deliberating until you reach an actual end. That may be what I was looking for.
I couldn’t tell you when I last bought a ball of string, or what the previous ball was used for - I must have given it to someone who suddenly realised they needed some string, and I had exactly the right amount on hand.
One supermarket I visited this week sold a 40-metre ball of string, located among parcel boxes and packing tape, and looking about the same size as any amount of string I would see in similar circumstances. Is this the median length of string, the average amount that the average person needs? Providing a longer piece then becomes a specialist operation, as must be needing it in the first place.
The supermarket’s string would have cost me £1.45 - discovering I had no conception of how much string should actually cost, I also realised I had no idea of the price of a pint of milk, but when I don’t have milk in my coffee, that left one less question to answer.
There is one way to answer my ultimate question, following a cursory search online: two hundred metres. This was for a roll of green-coloured garden twine, and while I could see deals on multiple rolls of string, no single roll exceeded this length.
There does appear to be an answer for at what length does a piece of string become commercially unviable - anyone needing more than that probably owns the means of production to make it themselves. There are numerous claims, mostly in the United States, to the largest ball of twine on Earth, but I couldn’t verify if various pieces are being tied together in these cases, or if fibres are being twisted together to continue the original piece, and am I sure I want an answer to that? The spectacle of the ball’s eventual size appears to be what’s most important here.
Aside from whether twine counts as string, and avoiding further idioms about “the ties that bind” and so on, the human capacity for curiosity will continue asking questions beyond the point where the answer is found, as I know from experience. If your mind doesn’t like being still, it will look for stimulus from itself. Asking a question that stops debate only invites questions about that question. Here’s a question: did the first person to ask about the length of a piece of string actually need an answer, or was the request then kicked into the long grass. Did they have to call it a day before someone read the riot act to them?
How long is a piece of string? Exactly as long as I need it to be.
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