Friday, February 1, 2008

That Weird Word Thing

You know that experience in which you come across a word seemingly for the first time and then it almost immediately shows up someplace else?

I read a novel about the California gold rush this past week, and two days after finishing it, the word "Jehu" that was used frequently in the book showed up on the vocabulary-word-of-the-day email that I get.

Over Christmas, Robert and I did a crossword puzzle with a completely unfamiliar word meaning "half" that appeared only a few days later in a Thomas Perry novel (referring to how certain Indian tribes divide their clans into two groups and only allow intermarriage across this divide).

Does this happen to you?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That happened to me with the word "chthonic" in high school, and again with "splanchnic" in more recent years.