'Rock' meaning 'wear' or 'sport'

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Wed Sep 10 20:45:55 UTC 2008


Neal wrote:

"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."

If even one person finds the consequent thread of interest, mankind's
store of knowledge has been increased.

I heard a version, which I've forgotten, of this used on TV or in a
cable movie, I've forgotten which, in a story line that I've
forgotten.

-Wilson

On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 11:50 AM, Neal Whitman <nwhitman at ameritech.net> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Neal Whitman <nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET>
> Subject:      Re: 'Rock' meaning 'wear' or 'sport'
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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>>
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>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain

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