We are a nation in love with rankings.
We all want to be No. 1. I remember a septic tank cleaning service growing up that liked to brag, “We’re No. 1 in the No. 2 business.”
Whatever the reason, we’re obsessed with reading rankings. They’re so common online, there’s a name for them, “Listicles.” They’re not really articles, and they’re not just lists. And they routinely get people wound up.
Thus the one making the rounds again this week on Facebook: The 10 most redneck cities in Ohio.
The August 2015 article, making the rounds again off RoadSnacks.net, claims to use science to rank the most redneck places in the state. It used figures such as high school graduation rates, dive bars, mobile home parks, tobacco stores, places to get fishing, guns and ammo gear and the existence of classic redneck stereotype stores, like Golden Corral, Bass Pro and Dollar General.
Then it shot out the list. Kenton was No. 4 because it was 97 percent white, it was 11th in bars per capita, and it was 12 in guns and ammo per capita. I suspect that has something to do with the rampant deer population in the mostly rural county.
Celina made it to No. 5 in part because it had the ninth most mobile home and trailer parks in Ohio. I’ll let Mark Twain handle this one: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics,” he wrote in autobiography. I suspect some of those “trailer parks” around Grand Lake St. Marys have vacation homes nicer than some other places’ first homes.
I’m a sucker for these ranking lists, though. I read all sorts of clickbait, like the one on the top 10 things you didn’t know about “Boy Meets World.” (Did you know they changed Stuart Lempke’s name to Stuart Minkus because Lempke’s name actually belonged to someone in Philadelphia? Did you care?)
I’ll admit to trying to cash in on the trend, too. Last week I gave you “5 things not to say to kids over summer vacation,” an obviously lazy attempt to get my kids to do my work while I was on vacation. You’ll notice I couldn’t even turn it into 10 items because I write too long.
I tend to write a lot of headlines for the Better Business Bureau column that cash in on this phenomenon. (Yup, that’s “10 tips for avoiding escrow scams” you see on LimaOhio.com.)
There’s something intellectually comforting about someone breaking the facts into little blocks for you. Reading long-form journalism can be more challenging.
It could be worth it, though. I skimmed the top story in today’s newspaper, an introduction to our four-day series on heroin. It had an average of two identifiable facts per paragraph. Yet, for some reason, we declined to label it “76 things you really ought to know about heroin at home.”
Luckily, we still respect the intelligence of readers. That’s one thing you can count on.
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