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| Fifteen! Fifteen no's . . . ha ha ha! |
I try to cover all the bases here.
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No.
No no no.
No no no no no no no.
No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.
No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.
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I find that I can continue this series more-or-less indefinitely: first 1 "no," then 3, then 7, 15, 31, 63, and so on -- each number in the series being twice the previous number, plus one. For me, these are all natural numbers of times to repeat things. I just naturally stop at 2n - 1, without consciously keeping count. (In fact, I only discovered the pattern by recording myself and then going back and counting the no's.)
Try it yourself (preferably not in a public place!). Is this an idiosyncracy of my own, or have I just discovered Tychonievich's First Law of How Many Times People Repeat Things?
3 comments:
"Is this an idiosyncracy of my own"
Yes.
For me, five "no"s would be natural (in a descending scale) - but nothing more than that!
I don't mean that I would actually say "no" 63 times in an actual conversation -- just that if I set myself the (artificial) task of repeating "no" (or anything) an inordinate number of times, I naturally gravitate to particular numbers.
I suppose it has to be an odd number of "no"s otherwise they would cancel-out and make a yes...
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