Author Holly Bourne broke the brains of Twitter users, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men might never be able to put them back together.

YA Novelist Bourne, known for books including It Only Happens in the Movies and How Do You Like Me Now?, tweeted last week, “Who decided Humpty Dumpty was an egg? Its not in the lyrics, and deciding he’s a giant egg is quite a random leap for someone to make, and everyone else being like, ‘yeah, a giant egg on a wall. Of course.’”

The tweet has been viewed by more than 450,000 users on the social media platform since Jan. 9.

Bourne followed up the tweet with another highlighting the apparent illogic of the 18th-century nursery rhyme: “Also, imagine having NO ARMY because they’re busy fixing a broken egg. The king sent literally EVERYONE out to save the giant egg who isn’t actually an egg, leaving the realm wide open for attack.”

Bourne’s tweets scrambled people’s minds. “Mind blown. We have been egged on,” one Twitter user wrote. Another raised an entirely different question: “I wanna know who sent all the horses to perform surgery on an egg? The men, sure but all the horses? Why? a hoof is like the perfect egg-crushing tool!”

Several users responded that the rhyme was actually a riddle, and others attributed the characterization of Humpty as an egg to Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass. But regardless of the actual history, Bourne’s tweets created an omelet of confusion, especially after stories about the possible egg started to circulate in the press.

Writer and comedian Karen Kilgariff exemplified the furor with a tweet of her own last Friday: “‘Now they’re saying Humpty Dumpty was never an egg at all?! What the hell is going on?!’ -my dad, real loud and out of the blue.”

Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.