It was brought to my attention this week that a high proportion of recent Words of the Week have been three-letter words. Ill, Fly, Key… to name but three. ‘Is there a word for a three-letter word?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said.
And that was the end of that. Well, almost. Once upon a time, before Tim Berners-Lee was let loose to dabble in his coffee break, if there was a question you didn’t know the answer to you could just forget about it and carry on with your life. These days you can’t move on until you’ve Googled it. So I Googled it. And the best I came up with was trigraph or trigram (a word, coincidentally, that appeared last time in relation to ill). A trigraph (or trigram) is not a three-letter word per se but a group of three letters that combine to represent a given sound, e.g. ‘igh’ as in high, sigh, light etc.
I was tempted to defend myself by arguing that there are more three-letter words in English than there are words of any other length, but I stopped myself for two reasons: firstly, I knew I was making it up (‘When has that ever stopped you before?’ I hear you cry); and secondly, I came across this piece of work by a bloke called Ravi Parekh. If you’re nervous about clicking the link, I can tell you it’s a fantastic interactive histogram showing the distribution of word lengths in 25 different languages.
This is the kind of stuff the world needs more of.
Two things will strike you if you do look at it (go on, you know you want to): 1, that three-letter words make up only 0.6% of the English vocabulary; 2, how Genghis Khan found time to conquer anything while using an average of almost 12 letters a word is quite remarkable. In fact, the most common word length in Mongolian is 13 letters. Clearly they’re not triskaidekaphobic.
And finally he comes to the point.
Triskaidekaphobia, as you’ll remember from all those infuriating evenings in the 80s playing playing Trivial Pursuit, is the fear of the number 13. It comes from the Ancient Greek triskaideka, meaning 13, and phobos, meaning morbid fear, but it was only coined in 1910, in a book called Abormal Psychology by a bloke called Isador Coriat. He was a pioneer of Freudian psychoanalysis in America, who made a name for himself by making up the longest words he could think of and then frightening people with them. In his book, he examines the fear of Friday 13th, which, of course, is called paraskevidekatriaphobia. Who wouldn’t need a lie down on the couch after having to say that?
But is anyone really afraid of the number 13? I mean really? Morbidly afraid of it? What’s it going to do, eat you? Sure, people go to ridiculous lengths to avoid it, such as refusing to fly on Friday 13th or renumbering the 13th floor of a building 12A (who’s fooled by that!), but surely that’s just a back-covering exercise (he said politely), so that if a member of staff does start practising witchcraft in their lunch break and inadvertently conjures up a demon by the water cooler on floor 12A, who starts munching his way through members of the accounts department and thus delays the monthly payroll for October, at least you can say you did your best to avoid it.
But when you’re carrying out your risk assessment, bear this in mind: the 13th of any month is more likely to be a Friday than any other day of the week. Friday 13ths don’t just happen by chance – there’s a simple mathematical formula that will tell you exactly how and when they’re going to occur. If you want a bit of advance notice, any month that begins on a Sunday will have a Friday 13th in it.
This month, for example. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!
Triskaidekaphobes will point you to some horrible things that have happened on Friday 13th in history, as if that’s evidence of dark paranormal forces at work. Ha! If you were an ill-intentioned twerp (I’m saying if ) who wanted to spread a little paranoia among the triskaidekaphobes, what day of the week would you choose to commit your atrocity? Some horrible things have happened on Wednesday 26th too. England losing to Germany in Euro 96 springs to mind. I’ve been hexakaiicosaphobic ever since.
Happy Halloween.
