'Rock' meaning 'wear' or 'sport'

[Neal Whitman]

Arnold linked to the LL post I was remembering when I wrote the expression,
although I misremembered it and used "weird" instead of "cool" (in your
sense of "noteworthy but not necessarily important"). As for "three trees to
make a row", I am reminded of another one-degree-more-liberal version of the
rule was "One is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three time is enemy
action" that I came across in a James Bond novel.

And returning to the original subject, thanks Jesse and Ben for the earlier
attestations. I'm now reminding myself not to post these questions late at
night, when I forget to look at easily available references like the OED
before sending.

Neal

----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles Doyle" <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2008 11:24 AM
Subject: Re: 'Rock' meaning 'wear' or 'sport'


> ---------------------- Information from the mail
> header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: 'Rock' meaning 'wear' or 'sport'
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
> _____________________________________________________________
>
> ---- Original message ----
>>Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2008 06:49:39 -0700
>>From: "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
>>Subject: Re: 'Rock' meaning 'wear' or 'sport'
>>
>>On Sep 9, 2008, at 5:05 AM, Charles Doyle wrote:
>>
>>> Neal, I'm more interested in your expression "once is weird, twiceis
>>> queer," which you surrounded with quotation marks. Does that expression
>>> function proverbially in a folkgroup to which you belong?  It receives
>>> zero Google hits. (Is "queer" necessarily weirder than "weird"?)
>>
>>Geoff Pullum, 11/27/04:  Once is cool, twice is queer
>>  http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001672.html
>>
>>which begins:
>>
>>In an almost forgotten 1970 Sidney J. Furie movie about a pair of
>>itinerant motorcycle racers, Little Fauss and Big Halsy, a character
>>named Halsy Knox (Robert Redford) picks up not just one small-town
>>girl but two, and spends a hot night with them both. In the morning
>>his sidekick Little Fauss (Michael J. Pollard) is surprised to find
>>him creeping away before the girls wake up, and preparing to leave
>>town and move on. Fauss wonders why Halsy wouldn't want to stick
>>around for more of the same. But Halsy's reply is negative: "Uh, uh!
>>Once is cool; twice is queer."
>>
>>later:
>>
>>What the Once-is-Cool-Twice-is-Queer (OICTIQ) principle is saying is
>>that in the realm of human behavior a single event can be dismissed as
>>sporadic, but you have to take it seriously when you find a pattern
>>repeated twice or more, especially within a short space of time. I
>>want to suggest that this is in fact a rather useful rule of thumb for
>>linguists and philologists.
>>
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