I agree with Opal

A list should have three or more items, otherwise it’s not a proper list. The lonely 1 and 2 look pathetic compared to better endowed itemizations.

  1. May be you’re right.
  2. Who cares?
  3. Bye Malleus, Incus, Stapes!

In graduate school, there’s a whole subgenre of comedy known as comps humor – jokes people made to alleviate their anxiety about the ordeal known as comprehensive exams. (When I was a girl, you had to take all four – two two-hour exams and two four-hour exams that comprehensively cover all elements of four different subjects – within two weeks. There was oodles of anxiety. I understand nowadays they’re not bunched like that – sissies.)

Anyway, someone suggested that all you needed to know for comps was that any question had one of three possible answers:

  1. Yes
  2. No
  3. Who the hell cares?

Make of this response what you will.

Panache’s Corollary to Opal’s Law:

A medley must contain three or more songs.

  1. I agree.
  1. I need two items at the store.
  2. I have a bad memory.
  3. I write them down on paper, and that is my shopping _______ ?
  1. Don’t think that you’re going to get us to turn your name into a meme.
    b. I think we’re doing just fine as we are.
    On the Gripping Hand: jokes about the forms rather than the substance get sort of old after a while.

It already is a meme. Just one that’s particularly bad at replicating itself.
(no offence!)

Thing.

You can’t come up with the word for this? You really DO have a bad memory.

Listette? Mini-list? Liszt?

It’s just that we human beings like the numbers 3 and 5. A list looks odd when it only have 2 or 4 items. Strangely, at least me for me, list with 6 items or more don’t look strange regardless of how many items there are. I guess it is because our brain process stuff in chunks of 3s and 5s, and occasionally 7s.

As it stands, we need a filler for item #5. I opt for “profit!”

I can usually stave off the problem by starting with:

  1. Make a list.

If I can’t come up with a third item, I add:

  1. Cross off 1.

Good strategy, although it only works for steps.