Listmania

Michael is an Organised List Person. He writes lists to help himself concentrate, to help remember things, to keep things straight, to make sure he’s not leaving anything out. Consequently his life is very organised and he rarely forgets things.

When he was about nine, he wanted to read several series of his favourite books at once. But he wanted to make sure that he did it decently and in good order. So he typed up a list dividing all the reading up into appropriate segments, in methodical sequence. He still has the list, and showed it to me once after we were married. It is about four pages long, and is a masterful integration of The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, the Wizard of Oz books, and the Sugar Creek Gang series. There are about two hundred line items, beginning with The Silmarillion pp. 1-(I forget, but it was the logical dividing line in the story), then going to the first Sugar Creek Gang book, next taking so many chapters of The Magician’s Nephew, then The Wizard of Oz, etc. He even stopped short a few pages shy of the end of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and put The Horse and His Boy next on the list in the next Narnia slot, because, chronologically, that is how it happened.

I am a Random List Person. I will notice something, and later, I will notice something similar, and think, ‘I detect a pattern here – how many more instances of x can I find?’ Sometimes I’ll actually write them down, but more often I’ll think of two or three, decide I have a pattern, intend to write it down, and forget about it until I notice another instance of the same phenomenon. Then I’ll think, ‘Wow, yet another instance of x! Wait – what were the first two?’

My lists are rarely useful lists, like shopping lists or to-do lists. Instead they are interesting lists. My most comprehensive list (so thorough only because I started writing it down, several years ago) has about ten items on it and is unofficially titled ‘Inevitable Adjective/Noun Combinations.’ I haven’t been able to find the list for quite some time, but right off the top of my head, I can remember that it included:

Impenetrable fog
Sickening thud
Wry chagrin
Frightful rate

Recently it occurred to me to collect Clever Sayings Whereby You Use The Wrong Word For Comic Effect, as in:

You poor depraved child
I resemble that remark very strongly
The meal was expansive (that is not my southern accent attempting to describe the price)

Then I also like to find Consonant Sequences That Make Words No Matter What Vowel You Put In, as in:

Bg (bag, beg, big, bog, bug)
Mss (mass, mess, miss, moss, muss)
Lst (last, lest, list, lost, lust)

I thought of the beginnings of another List a couple of days ago, only I can't remember the category anymore. What a pity. It was a very interesting phenomenon and I wanted to discover more. As soon as I think of it, I will write it down, lest it be lost like the last list.