The Challenge of Categories

Here's a quiz, sort of second-grade level.  Which of these four things doesn't belong with the others?

• Fork
• Spoon
• Knife
• Plate

The answer that emerges for most of us is the Plate, because the other three fit a category of "silverware" and a plate doesn't.  But...

• it could be the Knife, because it's the only one you can't carry food with
• it could be the Fork, because the others all have five letters
• it could be the Spoon, because it's the only one that has a letter that descends below the base line

Categories are in the eyes of the beholder.  Here's another one.  Let's say there's a room with a piano, a xylophone, and a double bass viol.  What is the category that holds all three of those things?  Again, we'd probably start by saying that they're all musical instruments.  And that's true.  But they're also things that are too heavy for me to carry; they're things I can't afford; and they're things I don't know how to use.  The nature of a "good category" depends on what I want that category to accomplish.

So last night, Nora and I spent a couple of hours developing the first-draft seating chart for dinner at the reception.  We have 20 tables, and we want to put people together who will enjoy one another's company.  So what categories do we use?

• We could do tables that are geographical, so that there are Boston tables and Middletown tables and Manhattan tables and a New Jersey table.  But that doesn't quite work, because a) not everybody from the same place likes each other, and b) there are a lot of ones and twos from other places.  Where do we put the two people from Kenosha and the other two people from Tampa and the one person from New Delhi?  It'd be a shame for one person to come all the way from North Carolina and have to sit by himself because there wasn't anybody else from there...
• We could do tables by family teams like the seating at most wedding ceremonies, where some tables are for Nora's friends and some tables are for Herb's friends and some tables are for people who like us both and maybe one table for people who don't like either one of us.  But most of the people there don't fit those teams very well, for which we're grateful.
• We could do tables by origin of meeting, so that one table is for my friends from the Council on Undergraduate Research, and one is for the people I met while doing my dissertation, and one is for the people we know from classes we've taught.  But the reason these particular people are coming to the wedding is because our relationship has grown far richer than those origins.
• We could do tables by age, so that everybody under 25 is at one table and everybody over 80 is at another table.  But we don't know how old everyone is, and it's rude to ask.  And imagine putting Al Franken and Rush Limbaugh at one table just based on the fact that they were both born in 1951... maybe not such a good thought.  (Don't worry, it's okay, neither of them are coming.)
• We could do tables by occupation, so that the farmers are all at one table and the factory workers at another and the college teachers at another.  But who wants to come to a wedding to talk about work?  Yuck.
• We could do tables by hobby, so that all the piano players sat together, and all the knitters and spinners sat together.  But we don't know everybody's hobby... there might be a whole table full of jugglers or antique locksmiths or ferret owners if only we'd thought of it.

In the end, we have table assignments categorized by some combination of all six of those elements, plus a little bit of common sense about shyness and garrulousness and old feuds.  It was really fun, and we'll do it again a few more times as we get firmer confirmations.  The invitations will go out in about a week and a half, and we'll start to get a much more realistic sense of who sits with who (for the first ten minutes, anyway — after that, people go where they want to go anyway, which is fine by us).