I spent a lot of time with my 15 month old granddaughter the last week. I realized that there seems to be a fascination with the number "3" in children's literature.

Goldie Locks and the three bears
Rubba dub dub, three men in a tub
Three blind mice

I just wondered how many three items we could come up with and if there is another number that seems prevalent to someone else.

Until recently it was believed that there were three Wise Men that night in Bethlehem, but recently found evidence shows there were actually four.

The fourth one was rejected and forgotten.

The gift he brought

.............. was

................................fruitcake.

The Three Billygoats Gruff

Aladdin got three wishes when he rubbed the lamp.

The Three Little Pigs

One of my favorites for kids is "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod", by Eugene Field.

Dorothy had three companions in OZ - the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Man. (OK in the subsequent books hundreds more were added but it was three to start with.)

Then there's Tweedledee, Tweedledum and Tweedledamned but that's another story. Actually I think it's one I wrote.

Non curo ! Si metrum no habet, non est poema.

Read all about my travels around the world here.
Read even more of my travel writing and poems on my weblog.

One ubiquitous threesome is the Trinity, which for me has recently been warped by the following mondregreen:

A Baptist minister overheard his nine-year-old son and his friends conducting a funeral for a dead bird. His son's voice:

"Now it's time for us to sing the funeral song ... Glory be to the Father and to the Son ... into the hole he goes."

Jerry, I'm sorry to have to tell you that your references to the Holy Trinity became out of date following Easter Sunday. The following was reported in The Onion of late February. (It is unfortunately not archived on their site, but oft-quoted elsewhere.)

quote:

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God Quietly Phasing Holy Ghost Out Of Trinity

HEAVEN—Calling the Holy Trinity "overstaffed and over budget," God announced plans Monday to downsize the group by slowly phasing out the Holy Ghost. "Given the poor economic climate and the unclear nature of the Holy Ghost's duties, I felt this was a sensible and necessary decision," God said. "The Holy Ghost will be given fewer and fewer responsibilities until His formal resignation from Trinity duty following Easter services on April 20. Thereafter, the Father and the Son shall be referred to as the Holy Duo."

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wordnerd,

I forthrightly refuse to follow your hilarious post with a pun on giving up the ghost.

You can' MAKE me do it !!!

God is not dead. He's just giving up .....

There is a very old story that a group of literati, the guest on a call-in radio program, were asked to name three works of literature having three famous individual ghosts.

They quickly came up with the Hamlet (Ghost of Hamlet's Father) and A Christmas Carol (the Ghost of Marley and ghosts of Christmas's past, present and future).

But then they were stumped. One suggested "Great Caesar's Ghost!", a common expletive by Perry White of the Superman comics, but this was dismissed as neither literature nor a character.

Finally, one of them blurted out, "Eureka! I've got it! It's the Book of Ruth, in the Bible. "John," the others told him gently, "there's no ghost there."

"Sure there is," said our hero. "Remember thu most famous line: 'Whither thou ghost, I ghost.' "

Three little kittens,
They lost their mittens,
And they began to cry,
Oh mother dear,
We sadly fear,
That we have lost our mittens.

What! Lost your mittens,
You naughty kittens!
Then you shall have no pie.
Mee-ow, mee-ow, mee-ow,
No, you shall have no pie.

The three little kittens,
They found their mittens,
And they began to cry,
Oh, mother dear,
See here, see here,
We have found our mittens.

What! Found your mittens,
You silly kittens!
Then you shall have some pie.
Purr-r, purr-r, purr-r,
Oh, let us have some pie.

The three little kittens,
Put on their mittens,
And soon ate up the pie;
Oh, mother dear,
We greatly fear,
That we have soiled our mittens.

What! Soiled your mittens,
You naughty kittens!
Then they began to sigh,
Mee-ow, mee-ow, mee-ow.
Then they began to sigh.

The three little kittens,
They washed their mittens,
And hung them out to dry;
Oh mother dear,
Look here, look here,
We have washed our mittens.

What! Washed your mittens,
You're good little kittens .
But I smell a mouse close by!
Hush! Hush! Hush!
I smell a mouse close by.

Old King Cole ...... fiddlers three

Baa baa black sheep ..... three bags full

Three coins in a fountain
Each one seeking happiness
Thrown by three hopeful lovers
Which one will the fountain bless

Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres

Here's a bit of trivia that may win you a free beer in a bar bet or, depending on how you present it, get you slapped:

Question: How many people were in "The Three Stooges"?
Answer: Six - The original trio of Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Shemp Howard (the oldest of the 3 Howard brothers), Curly (Jerome Howard, the youngest) who filled in when Shemp left the act to go solo, Joe Besser who was hired after Curly had his stroke and Shemp died and, finally, Curly Joe De Rita who was the third Stooge in the full-length movies.


And then there were The Ritz Brothers and the totally unrelated Peter, Paul & Mary, Three Dog Night, and a somewhat mediocre and completely forgotton comedy troupe from the 60's with (I thought) a killer name: The Uncalled For Three.


And no discussion of trinities is complete without Dorothy Parker's immortal:

Three are the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and love and a sock in the eye.


(An A+++++ and probably as close to literary and poetic perfection as I ever hope to experience.)

We do seem to have a love affair with the number three...

three point turn
three toed sloth
three piece suit
three quarter time
three ring circus
three way calling
three mile island
three martini lunch (my personal favorite)
threepenny opera
three strikes, you're out!

"We do seem to have a love affair with the number three..."

better make that a love/hate relationship.

three on a match
going down for the third time [implication: and last...]
giving someone the third degree (though we can't seem to agree whether a higher degree is better or worse sometimes)

It's just a number big enough to be significant but small enough to be able to get our brains around, and it can't be separated into smaller fragments the way four or six can, so it has its own identity.

quote:

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Originally posted by haberdasher:

three on a match

---

what does this mean??

Very bad. The way I've heard it explained, though I've never verified it, if three soldiers light their cigarettes on one match at night, then they have given an enemy sniper enough time to aim at the light and fire at it...not a good thing.

Afterthought: probably doesn't belong in this thread; after all, it started out as "threes in children's literature"...

I've heard the same explanation.

Can anyone confirm my dim recall of reading that some primitive tribes have no word for any specific number higher that three, but rather call any higher quantity "many"?

(This does not mean that they can't keep track of higher numbers. For example, a herder taking out (say) 30 sheep at the beginning of the day will, as each sheep exits the pen, put a stone in a bag. Then when re-penning the sheep at day's end, he removes one stone as each sheep enters the pen. If any stones remain in the bag he knows that a sheep was missing and needed to be found. But he accomplishes this without having any word meaning "thirty".)

Might you have come across it in George Gamov's One, Two, Three? That's an informative book from the Fifties trying to explain things scientific to educated, interested, inquiring-but-not-technically-oriented laymen, in Chapter Two or so. But I think even there it was mentioned as an anecdote or parable rather than an anthropological fact.

I suspect this may indeed be your source, because the chapter went on to develop the theme - development of society's number skills - exactly as you did, with the one-to-one correspondence coming right after the story.

[This message was edited by haberdasher on Thu May 1st, 2003 at 4:04.]