'Rock' meaning 'wear' or 'sport'

[Mark Mandel]

Well, but ANY two points define a line (Euclid). You don't have a row
till you have three, preferably with approximately equal spacing.

"Once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action."
-- Ian Fleming's _Goldfinger_ IIRC, and many other places and forms.

But I do agree that sometimes two makes a pattern. When our kids were
small, we shared group-care responsibilities with other couples. One
time we took them out for ice cream or some such. The next time we had
the group, my wife suggested doing it again, and I said (AFAIK,
spontaneously coining) "Uh-uh! With kids, once is a treat, twice is a
tradition!": i.e., after the second time they'll expect it to become
regular. Of course, generalizing from little evidence is a very basic
human and other-animal world-learning tool, but as adults we're
supposed to be more careful.

m a m
Everybody generalizes from one example. At least, I do. -- Steven K.Z.
Brust, _Issola_

On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Charles Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:
>
> Thanks, Arnold. Is "once is weird, twice is queer," then, just an ad hoc (half-rhyming) variant of "once is cool, twice is queer" (which registers 39 Google hits, many of them referring to either the Language Log entry or the movie)?  That is, "weird" in the sense of 'noteworthy but not necessarily important'?
>
> In any case, it's an interesting principle. It reminds me, though, of what my old professor Archibald Hill used to say: "It takes three trees to make a row," meaning (au contraire) that merely two instances canNOT be regarded as constituting a pattern.
>
> --Charlie

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