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OP AKA Rock, Paper, Scissors.
When I was a yoot we counted out the preliminaries in this game with the syllables, 'Lam, Zam, Po.' I never understood why and never really bought the explanation that it was Italian for 'one, two, three.' I had heard that the game was sometimes called Roshambo, but have just recently discovered (from none other than Uncle Cecil: http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mrockpaper.html) that it is so called after Jean Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau. It just occurred to me that perhaps that was the origin of our counting phrase Lam Zam Po. The biggest jump there is from the Ro to the Lam. So my first question is, "can anyone give me good linguistic reasons for believing this?" My next question is, "What is the word for the relationship of three items where A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A?"
Well, I've heard them called counting out games. The prototypical one being eenie, meenie. Wikipedia has a nice section on the anti-transitivity of roshambo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock,_Paper,_Scissors
OP Non-transitive. That answers that question. And that's the aspect I was looking for, not the counting out aspect. Now I can google for those non-transitive dice.
somebody at Wikipedia must be watching us, the Rock, Paper, Scissors article is the Featured Article today...
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