Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Forum administrators, Interface administrators, Moderators, Rollbackers, Administrators
116,470
edits
One for Sorrow, Two For Joy: Difference between revisions
→Music: added example
Looney Toons (talk | contribs) m (→Fanfic: quote italics) |
Looney Toons (talk | contribs) (→Music: added example) |
||
| (6 intermediate revisions by 2 users not shown) | |||
Line 4:
''Three for a girl, four for a boy,''
''Five for silver, six for gold,''
''Seven for a secret that must never be told.''
|'''[[Mother Goose]]'''}}
{{quote|''Other birds collect twigs for their nests. Magpies collect jewels for theirs.''|Flavor Text for the ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'' card [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid{{=}}129764 Thieving Magpie]}}
Magpies. Black and white birds that feature in a lot of stories. There are also a number of superstitions surrounding magpies (especially in the British Isles) related to warding off the bad luck of a lone magpie. Some superstitions are quick and only require a simple salute while others a bit more eccentric involving pinching, spitting or saying certain phrases.
Line 15 ⟶ 16:
One popular [[Any Torment You Can Walk Away From]] [[Happy Ending]] is for accusations of theft to be cleared up by the revelation that a magpie stole the item in question.
{{examples}}
* The Windex cleaning spray commercials prominently feature magpies.▼
== [[Comic Books]] ==
Line 27 ⟶ 31:
** Ashe Corven of the movie ''[[The Crow]]: City of Angels'' references this rhyme as well as he's trashing the bad guys of a strip booth establishment where his second target is, using crows in place of magpies.
==
▲* The Windex cleaning spray commercials prominently feature magpies.
▲== [[Fanfic]] ==
* The rhyme is used in the ''[[Kingdom Hearts]]'' fanfic ''[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2941935/1/A_Sorrow_of_Magpies A Sorrow of Magpies]'' in a [[What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic]] kind of way.
** More specifically, the rhyme is as follows:
Line 48 ⟶ 49:
== [[Literature]] ==
* Several versions of the rhyme occur in [[Terry Pratchett]]'s ''[[
** One of the peripheral Discworld books (I think it might have been an art collection){{verify}} also has Pterry bemoan the fact that Britain used to have hundreds of regional variations on this rhyme, but nowadays if you ask anyone they'll all give you the version from ''Magpie''.
*** He bemoans this state of affairs in "The Folklore of Discworld," but happily he got to know the book's co-writer, Jacqueline Simpson, because she answered "which one?" to the question "do you know the magpie song
* There's a book called ''One For Sorrow, Two For Joy'', by Clive Woodall, about more-or-less-anthropomorphic birds. It's a little like ''[[Watership Down]]'', but with birds. The villains are magpies.
* Tom McCaughren's ''Run with the Wind'' series about a group of Irish foxes has a flock of magpies as minor villains.
Line 63 ⟶ 64:
* In [[J. R. R. Tolkien]]'s ''Unfinished Tales'', one of the tales after ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'' includes going through Saruman's tower and discovering he had become not a dragon but a magpie with what he hoarded. They still find a treasure there.
== [[Live
* ''Magpie'' was the name of a kids' TV show on [[ITV]] in the 1970s (which was pretty much a ''[[Blue Peter]]'' lookalike). The theme tune used a version of the rhyme as its lyrics, and the show's mascot was a cartoon magpie named Murgatroyd, who looked too fat to fly.
* In the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' episode "Boom Town", the Slitheen Margaret Blaine described the Doctor as having a "magpie mind", i.e. one that's always collecting bits of information.
* Richard Hammond on ''[[Top Gear]]'' once went on about how dangerous Magpies are while driving, because of all the gestures you have to preform. Seems Hammond got a bit confused, and rather than picking one of the many variations to ward off bad luck, chose them all.
== [[Music
* The rhyme itself appears in the song "A Murder of One" by [[Counting Crows]]. As corvids, magpies are part of a family of birds known as crows. The rhyme is also the origin of the band's name.
* Seanan McGuire's [[Filk Song]] [http://seananmcguire.com/songbook.php?id=143 "Counting Crows"] opens with a version of the rhyme, and continues on the theme. Chorus:
Line 76 ⟶ 77:
* A magpie appears in the artwork to some early albums by [[Marillion]], and is referred to in the lyrics of ''Misplaced Childhood''. One of the band's live albums is titled ''La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie)'' after the Rossini opera (see below).
* [[Patrick Wolf]] has a song that quotes the aforementioned rhyme as the last stanza. Unsurprisingly the song itself is named [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mLhqJMy_WA Magpie]
* "Two Magpies" off of [[Paul McCartney
* The rhyme makes an appearance in the song [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKXBvK34rgg "Ravens in the Library"] by [[S.J. Tucker]] where it's song softly in counterpart to one of the early verses:
{{quote|''One for fiction, two for truth (One for sorrow)
== [[Opera]] and [[Theater]] ==▼
''Three for bikes and bathing suits (Two for joy)
* In Rossini's ''Thieving Magpie'', the charges of theft against a servant girl are resolved when they discover a magpie stole it.▼
''Four for sci-fi/fantasy (Three for girls and four for boys)
''Five loves art and ancient skulls (Five for silver)
''Six eats periodicals (Six for gold)
''Seven lives in poetry (Seven for a secret never told)}}
== [[Oral Tradition]] ==
* The famous rhyme, with many variations. (Sometimes quoted for [[Ravens and Crows]]
** '-eight's a wish, and nine a kiss; ten is a bird you must not miss.'
** ... eight for heaven, nine for hell, And ten for the devil's own sel'.
Line 93 ⟶ 98:
* The "Freedom City" setting for ''[[Mutants and Masterminds]]'' has a [[Gentleman Thief]] named Magpie who can [[Transporters and Teleporters|teleport]], but ''never'' would he teleport ''into'' a building—he [[Self-Imposed Challenge|savors the challenge of breaking in the hard way]]. His power is used ''only'' for last-second escapes, and even then only if he can't vanish any other way.
* Both normal and giant magpies were described in the ''Creature Catalog'', a monster book for Basic/Expert/etc D&D. Their stats made them weak in combat, but excellent filchers of unattended shiny objects; in effect, they were a potential hook for the DM to lure parties into other encounters, by having a magic item snatched up by this trope's embodiment and forcing them to pursue it.
▲* In Rossini's ''Thieving Magpie'', the charges of theft against a servant girl are resolved when they discover a magpie stole it.
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* In ''[[No Rest for The Wicked (webcomic)|No Rest for The Wicked]]'', [http://www.forthewicked.net/archive/05-05.html November was teased for using the verse for ravens, instead of magpies.]
* In ''[[Tales of the Questor]]'', [https://web.archive.org/web/20130227023240/http://www.rhjunior.com/totq/00543.html they observe that going through the princeling's treasure found a lot of cheap bits, because he was like a magpie.]
== [[Western Animation]] ==
Line 102 ⟶ 110:
{{reflist}}
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Avian Tropes]]
[[Category:Fate and Prophecy Tropes]]
| |||