Lists & hierarchies

Y U in this list?

Here's a list. What do you the list items have in common?

Short-order cook

Stapler

Revenge

Ice skating

Kilogram

Where

Writelike

One thing they have in common is "these are all items in this list".

That's not a joke: it's a serious point.

By making the list, you necessarily put the items into at least one group, which is "items in this list".

Nope! Can you think why I put it in?

Because it isn't a noun. The other items are all nouns (although 'revenge' and 'kilgoram' are abstract while the others are concrete).

I included an adverb to break the pattern of 'all the items are things'.

You could, however, define other relationships:

  • Words I chose at random
  • English vocabulary
  • Strings of text using less than 20 characters

Obviously these all feel like a bit of a stretch—a billion lists could be called "English vocab"—but the thing to notice is that you can stretch: these relationships are flexible.

Let's give the list a title that states the relationship between items:

Items in this list:

Short-order cook

Stapler

Revenge

Ice skating

Kilogram

Where

Writelike

Alright, well, at least now we know what the point of the list was! 🤷‍♂️   

Here's another example. What is the relationship between these items:

Goat

Chair

Portrait

Tongs

Satellite dish

Writelike

A few possibilities:

All of these are true, but what's the intended relationship?

You don't know unless I tell you:

Things owned by some of the people photographed in Peter Menzel's Material World:

Goat

Chair

Portrait

Tongs

Satellite dish

Writelike

You get the idea. All items in a list are related, but that you as the list creator need to define that relationship, because there are many possibilities.

Here's another list:

Recordings NASA sent into space on the Voyager probes in 1977 hoping they would be heard by aliens:

Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F, First Movement

Javanese gamelan music

Senegalese percussion

Zaire pygmy girls’ initiation song

Australian aborigine songs “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird”

Chuck Berry's “Johnny B. Goode”

Japanese song “Tsuru No Sugomori” (“Crane’s Nest”)

Writelike

Notice how much information is added by the list title?

  • Without that title, it's just a list of musical items.
  • But with that title, the list is now "a selection of music chosen to represent human civilisation to an alien intelligence, that was engraved on a gold records and shot into space and is currently on probes that have become the farthest-travelled human objects in history".

So the list title is important!

Now it's your turn. Make a list and include a title to describe the relationship between items at the top of the list.

Your list can be anything! Weirder the better! But make sure all the items have a relationship (and not just "they're all words").

Make a list of weird items and, at the top, use a list title to state how they are related.

Alright, we've got items in a bucket, and we've told people what the bucket is about.

Let's make it a little more complicated.

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