While scientists have long known of the general problem known as the “group of three,” families have always experienced the problem. There is an old adage about kids that goes something akin to: one child presents the spoiled child possibility, two children begets the “mommy loves me best” retort, while with three children, one will be ganged up on by the other two. It is the third child which brings a new level of chaos to the family.

Sociologists explain the phenomena as a non-linearity in which groups of three cause social complexities. Two siblings have one relationship. But a third child results in seven kinds of ties among the siblings — three one-on-one relationships, three one-on-two relationships and one group relationship. Parents, by definition, are outnumbered, and bedlam can ensue.

Outside of the family, you probably have all kinds of “groups of three” that are not marked by bedlam. These tend to exhibit linear relationships. It is nonlinear groups of three that are of interest to researchers, politicians and linguists… and no doubt others.

Isaac Newton is credited with discovering gravity. Although I would note people discovered (or experienced) gravity long before Newton but I digress. Newton mathematically described gravity and used that to predict the movements of celestial bodies, such as the moon’s path around the Earth (the two body dynamic). Next he thought he would improve his lunar path calculations by taking the sun’s gravitational tugs into account. Instead, it made them worse – the group of three phenomena – as he moved into non-linear complexity. Even at the end of his life he wrote about his annoyance with his inability to model the group of three dynamics.

Political leaders today are faced with the group-of-three dynamics. US-USSR relations in the post-WWII era were relatively straightforward – well, at least when compared to US-Russia-China relationships. As China greatly expands their nuclear arsenal, the theory of “mutual destruction” that served the Cold War era standoff is morphing into a potentially non-linear group-of–three problem.

The more security-minded folks in the think tanks want to expand the American arsenal in response to China’s nuclear rise and the threat of Beijing’s closing ranks with Moscow. Others see a window for three-body downsizing. They want to break the problem into smaller and more manageable parts. For instance, they argue that the USA should deal with the two superpowers independently and seek diplomatic bonds that reinforce two-body stability. It is a three child family with no parental supervision.

What about you, me and the linguists? English language verbs can present us with the three-body problem in the usage of present-past-prefect participles. Some verbs are very linear; consider “walk”. The past tense is straightforward; “I walked.” The past participle is typically used in conjunction with “have” or “had” to form the present or past perfect — e.g., “I have walked or I had walked.”

Hold that thought while you consider the verb “blink” recently used in Justice Brown’s dissenting argument on college admissions policy. What is the past tense? There is a high probability you are thinking “blinked.” Correct. But why isn’t the past tense of “sink” rendered as “sinked”?  By the way, what are the past and perfect tenses of “sink”? The past and past participles are “sank” and “sunk,” as in the song from “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” “stink, stank, stunk.” Since stink, sink and blink all rhyme, why don’t we have “blink, blank, blunk?”

One might argue that we would confuse the past-tense use of “blank” with blankness as emptiness, but context would provide the necessary clarity… that is unless one is not offered enough context between the description of the fate of a leaking boat (sink) with the feature of kitchens and bathrooms (sink). Context offers a lot.

Still, English speakers like the two-body solution, e.g. “walk-walked” to provide all we need for  past, present perfect and past perfect tenses. We are subconsciously trying to use the language in such a way that each verb only has two forms rather than three. And so language morphs. You’ll find lots of people saying “sunk” for “sank” (“Our boat sunk”). Is “sank” becoming a linguistic victim of our two-body solution for things? Or perhaps there is a larger conspiracy of the participle silently eliminating forms of the past tense. If so we are likely witnessing the ultimate demise of “sank.” It will have sunk. Sorry… I couldn’t help myself.

We English speakers are an adaptable lot. Were it that solutions to the three-body dynamic of children and nuclear weapons were as casually addressed.

Inspired by articles from John McWhorter and William J. Broad