(By Richard Goodman, 21 November 2015)
The other day, I downloaded a new app for my phone. It is called “The List App” and it is exactly
what you think it is- an app where people make lists of various things. Any kind of thing, really. There is a list of books people have on their
bedside table, a list of the five best burger places in L.A., a list of childhood
crushes which includes non-famous people, a ranking of “Saved By The Bell
Songs”, a list of shows that used rape as a plot point, a list of carpet colors
that the lister did NOT buy at Home Depot (a very funny list, actually), and of
course the scary-in-so-many-ways list “Proof That My Cat Wants To Kill Me”.
There are some celebrities on the app too, since it was
started by one (B.J. Novak, from The Office, Knocked Up, and, um, The Smurfs)
and he is taking an active role in trying to expand the fan base by hands on
curating and list making. Granted, there
is no “Anna Kendrik level” celebrity lister, but there are some people I like,
such as Aya Cash (You’re The Worst), Gillian Jacobs (Community) and Edgar
Wright (Shaun Of The Dead). Of course,
Lena Dunham is on the app too but I just can’t make myself follow her. So as I look at the various lists, I notice
some people follow the conventional 5 or ten point list but then there are
others that do random numbers or longer lists.
That got me thinking about what people normally use as a
standard length when making lists and why they use that particular number of
items for their list. Here is my
official ranking, as determined by a completely subjective and non-scientific
method, of the most commonly used quantities when making a list of things.
10- The gold standard of list length. Everyone makes top ten lists when compiling
“stuff”. Even if they only have 7 items,
they find a way to stretch it out to get to ten items because ten is such a
nice number. It feels comprehensive but
not overwhelmingly so and it fits nicely on a page or a screen. It is also how you normally count things, if
you are European (or, really, anything but American) and embrace the logic of
the metric system. Ten items allows for
some flexibility and room for non-obvious choices on a list. Imagine if a list of the best Stephen King
novels was only 5 items long. That list
would always contain The Stand, Salem’s Lot, The Shining, It, and Misery. You wouldn’t be able to let Night Shift, The
Green Mile, Firestarter, Carrie, Different Seasons, Pet Semetary, Under The
Dome, Skeleton Crew, or Thinner on the list and they deserve
consideration. David Letterman cemented
the ten item list in pop culture consciousness through years of humorous use
(and some groaningly bad use) on his late night show.
5- This is the little sibling of the Top
Ten list. Sometimes you have time or
space constraints, like when a news channel or morning radio talk show has
about a minute of air time to banter and make jokes about the previous week’s top
movies at the box office. You want to
seem like you are covering the entertainment news but you can’t really devote
too much time to the topic. This type of
use usually means that someone took a top ten list and only discussed the first
five items. It is like a Cliff’s Note’s
version of a top ten list. A Top Five
list is also used when you just can’t legitimately get to ten items. For example, you can’t make a top ten list of
your favorite Beatles. Once you rank Paul McCartney, George Harrison, John
Lennon, and Ringo Starr (and in that order), you are basically just deciding
whether to put either Pete Best or Stu Sutcliff on the list. That’s on six names you are dealing
with. Even if you get sort of crazy and
decide to throw in Billy Preston or George Martin, or really crazy and include
Brian Epstein, that’s only nine names, tops.
It is better to display restraint and judgment and keep the list to 5
legitimate names so your list has some validity.
20- The expanded, deluxe edition of the
Top Ten list for when you have so many good choices that limiting it to ten
items would be a disservice. For
instance, listing the top twenty James Bond movies, television series final
episodes, restaurants in the Washington DC area, movies of the year, dream vacation
destinations, and so forth. When the
number of quality choices goes way beyond ten items, you go to the expanded
edition and decide on twenty worthy selections.
Does your bucket list have just 5 items on it? No, probably not. It is more likely to be a list of 20 things
to do.
50 - Some things just need a longer length
so you can get into a scholarly discussion, like “What are the most important
chemical elements?” or “What are the most vital songs to include on a Rolling
Stones 3CD compilation?” You can bring
up obscure things that might have been more important than initially thought
and a longer list can bring that to light.
When you bring up a list of the best modern day inventions and
innovations, do you usually mention the zipper?
Self-adhesive labels and stamps?
The remote control? No, you
usually don’t if the list is a shorter one, like a ten or twenty item list,
which gets filled up with stuff like the computer, the wheel, flight,
refrigeration, pacemakers, television, the Internet, the highway system, and so
on. But imagine how annoying it would be
if you had to button all your clothes, tape labels to boxes and folders and
letters and change television channels by hand?
A list of 50 items might get to some of those lesser innovations that do
impact your life.
100- A list of a hundred items is really
only used for two things. First, it is
for music lists, like the Billboard Hot 100 Songs of the week or a list of the
best “something” in Rolling Stone magazine, like the 100 Best Guitarists Of
All-Time, or the 100 Greatest Rock & Roll Songs. The second, and most frequent, is a list of
wedding guests. Yep, 100 invited guests
is the ideal use for a list of 100 things.
Of course, the ideal list length for guests who RSVP affirmatively is
more like 50 or 20. Nobody actually
wants 100 guests to show up unless they have plenty of money to burn, aren’t
having a destination wedding or plan to have the food and drinks catered by KFC
and Bud Light.
3- This length is used when there are
only three items of note and the list is being used to rank their
importance. Like The Father, Son and
Holy Ghost or what are your favorites NCIS shows? (NCIS, NCIS: LA, NCIS: New Orleans) What are the best Hunger Games books (Hunger
Games, Mockingjay, Catching Fire) or Lisbeth Salander books (Dragon Tattoo,
Hornet’s Nest, Played With Fire)? What
are the best Matrix movies? (Yes, the
AniMatrix is a valid choice) What are
the best Indiana Jones movies? (Raiders
Of The Lost Ark, Temple Of Doom, Last Crusade in that order and no, Kingdom Of
the Crystal Skull is not a valid choice.)
Topics like those are the perfect use for a list of three. You only use this when there are exactly
three choices or you have less than five choices and you want to make a statement
by leaving off a fourth possible choice.
13, 21 & 29- No one makes lists of this
length. No one, that is, except Buzzfeed
and they use the crap out of them. Every
list they put out is some random number like the “13 Cutest Cat Videos”, the
“21 Elf On The Shelf Accessories You Need This Christmas”, and the “29
Playlists To Listen To When Everything Sucks”.
They own this concept but I do object to this willy-nilly usage. Surely if you can find 13 cat videos worth
watching, you can find 7 more and get to a list of twenty items. I’ve heard there are quite a few cat videos
on the Internet…..
12- A number used by self-help groups who
decided to add two more items to a Top Ten list to make it seem more
serious. I mean, have you ever seen the
Alcoholics Anonymous list of 12 steps?
There is some serious padding to it.
They could easily make it into a tight, concise list of ten items
easily, maybe even seven items if they tried hard, and tactically used some
semicolons.
40- List of this length were very popular
in the 70’s and 80’s but were used almost exclusively for showcasing the top
songs of the week as compiled by Casey Kasem, from Billboard magazine’s
charts. No one does Top 40 lists anymore
and certainly no one refers to “Top 40” as a type of musical programming. Music played on satellite radio channels are
determined by the name of the channel which alludes to their theme, like “The
Bridge” (songs that are not quite rock nor pop, what used to be called Adult
Contemporary), “The Pulse” (heavy dance music, what used to be called techno
and club music) and “Hair Nation” (hard rock and light metal from the mid
1980’s to mid 1990’s, what used to be called glam/hair metal.) Music played on terrestrial radio (AM/FM) is
just as niche as satellite radio but the stations don’t have cool names, there
are commercials and the playlists are controlled by one or two
mega-conglomerates like Clear Channel which dictates that the same 500 or so
songs are played by every station they run.
I sometimes wish I could still hear a diverse 40 song list and then
“Keep my feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars!”
500- Used exclusively for Memorial Day
countdowns of the 500 best songs of all-time on the classic rock station in
your area.
1,000- The number of places you are supposed
to have visited by the time you die, assuming you live a long time and have a
generous vacation day policy at work.
Tie: 1 & 11- Ties are used when someone is too
indecisive about which item to leave off a list to get it to one of the
commonly acceptable lengths, like five, ten or twenty. (Anyone who shows a tie on a 50 or 100 item
list is just being a putz, unless the list is based on numeric data and there
really is a statistical tie.) A tie that
results in a list that is really eleven items long means someone wanted to list
eleven items AND not look like a putz for list that is a non-standard
length. This actually makes them a bigger
putz than someone who just charges ahead with a non-standard length list.
One item lists are used by people who want to express an
opinion and make it look legit by putting it in a list. Just say it on Facebook or Twitter instead
because it isn’t a fact just because you show it in list form. Along the same lines, making a list like “The
Coolest Women I Know” and only listing your girlfriend means you want to
flatter her because you really enjoy having sex with her. Or you did something wrong and can’t afford
flowers and a real apology. It’s very
transparent, so just stop it.
Furthermore, listing something multiple times like “The Best
2016 Presidential Candidates” and saying number one is Donald Trump, number two
is Donald Trump and number three is…. also Donald Trump is even worse than just
listing one item. Plus it means you are
helping to send this country to hell in a hand basket and you scare me.
