It often happens that after I encounter a word I don't know and look it up, that word starts appearing everywhere. It happened with "peripatetic." I'd never heard of it, but it was on the GRE. I looked it up as soon as I got home and found that it means "walking or moving about; not staying in one place, itinerant," according to Webster. After that I came across that word no less than ten times in the following year. It still pops up regularly. Maybe I'm just more sensitive to the word, but it really seems as if it came out of nowhere.
The same thing happened with "schadenfreude" (enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others). This time I saw the word yesterday for the first time, then I read it again today in a textbook for class! Does this happen to you? Is it a world-wide phenomena? It like it when it happens--it makes me feel as if the world is operating on some sort of pattern.
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