Trinity Boat Club Syndrome

[simont]

A thing that has struck me from time to time is the surprising number of things that come in varieties labelled as ‘1’ and ‘3’, or ‘1st’ and ‘3rd’, missing out 2.

I tend to think of this as ‘Trinity Boat Club Syndrome’, since my standard example case is the 1st and 3rd Trinity Boat Club. (I've always faintly wondered what happened to the 2nd, and had rather hoped it would have been disbanded in mysterious circumstances after the inadequately explained sinking of a John's boat, or possibly an Oxford one; I was recently disappointed to find out that their website actually answers the question and it's nothing so exciting.)

There are several other common ones. You hear a lot about the Third World and the First World, but ‘Second World’ is not a widely used phrase by comparison. Fiction tends to appear in single novels or trilogies, with relatively few two-volume works in between. And both books and computer games are often described as first-person or third-person, but very few of either are second-person.

More domain-specific examples include the fact that in technical drawing, orthographic projections come in first angle and third angle, but never second, and that in violin-playing it's common to use first position and third position, but second position (while a perfectly meaningful concept) comes up rather less often.

So: what other examples of this haven't I thought of, and what can we do to rehabilitate the poor left-out number 2?

Comments

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Lies! Choose your own adventure books are second-person.

[simont]

Ooh, good one! I did carefully say "very few" because I knew of one piece of second-person writing (some of the scenes in Iain Banks's Complicity are written that way, presumably to enhance the feeling of complicity on the part of the reader), but that's a much better example.

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

Charlie Stross's Halting State and his still-being-written Rule 34 are in the second person, which some find mindbending but I quite enjoy.

[samholloway.livejournal.com]

As are all good computer text adventures. (You do occasionally find ones written for the computer to be the first person "I am in a room. Exits lead north and south." but all the classics are firmly 2nd person.)

[simont]

Ah, but does that make the game second-person? That's set up, after all, so that the player's input is (usually implicitly) in the first person ("go north" == "I go north"), and one could make a case that that's a more natural definition of "first person" for a game.

Then again, if I can't apply that argument to Choose Your Own Adventure, perhaps I shouldn't be applying it to computerised text adventures either. Hmmm. I think the underlying point here is that for a book to be in the first or third person is a grammatical statement, meaning that the protagonist is referred to respectively as "I" or "he/she/etc", but for a video game to be in the first or third person is a statement about viewpoint, meaning that the player sees respectively what the protagonist sees or what an uninvolved observer near the protagonist would see. So text adventures are second-person in the grammatical sense, but first-person in the viewpoint sense, and hence my confusion.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

in the first person ("go north" == "I go north")

I assumed it was in the imperative? I can't offhand think of any verb but "be", but I think I'd write "be cautious" not "am cautious" to the prompt.

[simont]

Perhaps that's why some games put the computer's descriptive text in the first person? It's grammatically consistent, if the character in the situation and the player making the decisions are distinct, that the character should tell the player "I'm in a room etc" and the player should reply to them in the imperative "Then go north".

I think in fact the normal setup is more infinitive than imperative: the computer says "You are in a room etc", and then implicitly (by presenting the prompt) asks "What do you do?". To the question phrased like that, I think, "be cautious" would be more natural than "I am cautious".

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

I think there's a special "first person imperative" that applies to this sort of avatar situation. I'm now wondering how this is expressed in adventure games in other languages, especially those with a distinct imperative declension:

> VENE

> VIDE

Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.

> VICE

[lionsphil.livejournal.com]

And, in fact, quite a few into the graphical golden age—one of the differences between Sierra and LucasArts being former keeping the narrator from text adventures ("you stupidly wave your hand through the laser grid and pull back a cauterized stump"), whereas the latter would just have the characters talk to "themselves" ("waving my hand through the laser grid would be immensely stupid").

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Argh, snap. Teach me not to read comments before replying.

[simont]

<f/x: sets up blackboard>

[samholloway.livejournal.com]

Beat figurehead Neal Cassady's autobiography is called "The First Third". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Cassady)

[uitlander]

"The 2nd world" tended to be used to describe former Eastern Block countries when I was a student.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Not quite the same, but you see a lot of talk of three-dimensional and two-dimensional things (e.g. 2D/3D graphics), but very little about one-dimensional things: there, it's the 1 that's left out.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

For quite a long period (http://lethargic-man.livejournal.com/305177.html), rail travel was 1st class & 3rd class.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, now it is just 2nd class & 3rd class, at least during peak hours.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Choose-your-own-adventure/Fighting Fantasy books are second person.

Godwin's Law

[gerald_duck]

The First Reich (Holy Roman Empire) and Third Reich are both much better known than the Second Reich (the German Empire).

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Hm. Other than chance and observer bias, one hypothesis would be that if there are only TWO common states, then they more often have comparative names like "standard" and "premier" and only when there's three do they start to be numbered.

Yes, I've a long rant about how "first and third" got its name, but it's not very interesting. (I am moderately impressed that this, and other tidbits of history, and reported accurately on college websites, although I'm surprised that they HAVE been accurate.)

[mooism.livejournal.com]

I went looking for the exact page that explains why 1st+3rd has no 2nd (http://www.firstandthird.org/plain/club/default.shtml) and observe that it has not been updated in over a decade, when it really should have been.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Arguably Portal - where the security bots have guns but you don't - is a second-person shooter.

[deborah_c]

Good violinists do tend to use second position a lot, but it's maybe less noticeable because by that stage you've generally stopped counting, and it's just "playing the notes as they fit best".

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Double bassists use second all the time, as we have to shift all the bloody time, as we can't pivot (unless we're willing to get tendinitis, or are NHØP), and tune in fourths (unless we're Joel Quarrington)...

[kaberett.livejournal.com]

This thing - though you'd be surprised at the number of teachers (and indeed section leaders) who've looked astonished at me when I've said "but that would go much better in second" over the years... :-/

[tackline.livejournal.com]

I'm tempted to write (or more honestly think about writing) a second-person shooting game now. Kind of like riding a bike with the steering set up in reverse.

[lionsphil.livejournal.com]

It's been done (http://games.softpedia.com/get/Freeware-Games/Second-Person-Shooter--Missing-Inaction.shtml). Annoyingly the author seems to have purged it from his projects list, so I can't find the previous writings about it.

[kilinrax.livejournal.com]

COBRA MK III

Larger, more popular version of the Cobra Mk I (the Mk 2 only reached prototype stage and was abandoned due to a design fault in the hull).

[simont]

Ooh, I don't think I even knew that one. Nice.

(It also suggests – a thought that's occurred to me before on this subject – that there might be quite a few more examples arising from second-system effect, in which only in the third version of a thing do the designers recover from the hubris they acquired from successfully shipping the first.)

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

What other examples of this haven't I thought of

God? Three and one at the same time, without being two.*

I rather like the idea that the "first and third" part of the boat club's name is there as a neat illustration of the "Trinity" part of the name...


* Unless, possibly, you're John Milton.

[simont]

... and suggests that I should rename the phenomenon "Trinity / Boat Club Syndrome"? Hmmm.

Nice one, though. (But I reckon I can come up with a good excuse for having overlooked it ;-)

[keirf.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_classification_in_Sweden_and_Finland

Finnish beer bottles have a I or a III (or occasionally an A) on them, indicating their strength. I've never seen a II and Wikipedia confirms that it's never used in practice.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of German edible mushrooms -- they typically come in "I. Wahl" (first choice: whole mushrooms) and "III. Wahl" (third choice: less "pretty" specimen, and usually in slices or pieces, e.g. bare stems without "hats"). I don't think I've ever seen "II. Wahl"/second choice.