the story of a girl who explores the family home of a mother, father,
and baby. The twist, of course, being that it’s a family of bears. This
narrative trick also explains the attraction of conspiracy theories,
which take real-life events and add an unexpected slant.[25]
Then there’s the structure of a story. Goldilocks’ popularity might
not be down to her, but rather the three bears. They turn the story
into a sequence of memorable triplets: the bowls of porridge are too
hot, too cold, just right; the beds are too soft, too hard, just right. This
rhetorical trick is known as the ‘rule of three’ and crops up regularly
in politics, from the speeches of Abraham Lincoln to Barack Obama.
[26] Why are lists of three so powerful? It might have something to
do with the mathematical importance of triplets: in general, we need
at least three items in a sequence to establish (or break) a pattern.
[27]
Patterns can also help with the spread of individual words. As
language evolves, new words often have to compete to displace
already popular ones. In such situations, we might expect people to
prefer words that follow consistent rules. For example, past tense
verbs often end in ‘...ed’, so it makes sense that the historical word
‘smelt’ has made way for ‘smelled’, while ‘wove’ is gradually
becoming ‘weaved’.[28]
Yet some words have evolved in the other direction. In the 1830s,
people would have ‘lighted’ a candle; nowadays we’d talk of having
lit one. Why did these irregular words outcompete popular ones? A
group of biologists and linguists at the University of Pennsylvania
reckon that rhyming might have had something to do with it. They
noticed that in the mid-twentieth century, Americans started saying
‘dove’ instead of ‘dived’ as the past tense of ‘to dive’. Around the
same time, newly popular cars were causing people to adopt words
like ‘drive’ and ‘drove’. Similarly, people started using ‘lit’ and ‘quit’
instead of ‘lighted’ and ‘quitted’ during the period that ‘split’ became
a popular way of saying you were going to leave.
There are two main ways that new words and stories can spread
through a population. Either they pass down from generation-to-
generation, perhaps picking up some variations along the way; this is