"And then she comes up to you and reveals that she's met your whole family before as well. In fact, you are her father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate. It seems there's only One Degree of Separation." This is NOT One Degree of Separation! It is Six!
Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of, "a friend of a friend" statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps or fewer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation
Average Twitter user degrees of separation: 4.67
Average on original Facebook expermiment with 5.8 million users: 5.73
There is no such thing as One Degreee of Separation, except in some Italian author's imagination...
Edited by luap
Except this is a different concept than Six Degrees of Separation. That is a real-life concept that can connect people, while this is a trope where people are connected even though logically they shouldn't be. The best example would be Lost, where in every person's flashback there is a connection to a different Lostie. There is no logical reason, it just is.
When my brother's fiancee's father first came over to our house, he and my father recognized each other; they grew up in the same neighborhood a block apart.
When I followed pro wrestling in the 1980s, I bragged that I could link any two wrestlers on Pro Wrestling Illustrated's ratings pages. Is this an application of this trope?
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Couldn't you argue that this is a sort of extended version of Chekov's Gun? The character that happened to fail the protagonist in biology in 12th grade (which is a current example) has to be the protagonist's love interest's father because otherwise, he's likely still not important enough to be mentioned.
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