Things like this have happened to me several times, but here is the latest example, just to illustrate what the hell I am talking about. Stay with me. So: several days ago (maybe on Monday?) I was at work doing English vocabulary on freerice.com (during work time, yes. Academic enough that an ESOL teacher can pass it off as a legitimate work activity? Perhaps.) and I encountered the word "salvo." It was a word I had never encountered before except in Italian names (my teacher Mrs. DiSalvo and Mamma DiSalvo's Italian Restaurant), and, in fact, did not even know was an English word. So I looked it up.
That's step one. Here's step two: TODAY I was reading my Google Reader, and I got to Pharyngula, which I usually just skim. And the title of a post is "The geologists fire a salvo".
To recap: on Monday, I had no idea this word was even a part of my language. On Thursday, I see it in print, used in context. It's a coincidence, of course, but the two things happened so close together as to give me pause. Close enough together that I noticed it. It's happened to me a few times.
I can think of a few explanations: 1) total coincidence. 2) Some sort of cognitive bias that makes this newly-learned word more salient in my mind and therefore I simply was more apt to notice it. It's a relatively rare word; maybe before I learned what it meant, I really had seen it in various places, but didn't look it up and skipped over it. 3) I am drawing a connection where there really isn't one. Freerice.com and Pharyngula are, I think, entirely unrelated...the only actual connection is that I read them both, and they both happened to contain the same word. I'm sure they contain lots of the same words, and this one only stands out because it happened to be a word I took the time to learn.
What I'm really wondering: Has this ever happened to you? I'm just curious. Maybe it's common like deja vu. Or I'm a nutjob who likes to find patterns and make connections, and my brain does it on autopilot.
6 comments:
maybe pz meyers also used free rice to that level of vocab.
or the whole bias thing
but the general idea of this instance is vaguely familiar to me, much like the word salvo.....hmmmm
I'm sure this has happened to me multiple times, but one occurrence that stands out in my mind is when I was in high school. We still took weekly vocabulary quizzes in my English class, and the words became more difficult and obscure as the year went on. "Zabernism" was one of the words, which means to abuse military or political power, or simply to bully. I had never, ever heard of it. The night after we took the quiz, I heard my dad shout "What zabernism!" at the evening news.
I would have had no idea what he was talking about if I hadn't studied for and taken the vocab test that very day.
Awesome! I'm so glad I'm not the only person this happens to! Maybe it's a cognitive phenomenon. Or maybe there's a glitch in the Matrix.
This happens to me from time to time too. If my shitty memory serves me well, mostly in CS areas. Can't offer any examples like the other cool kids.
I think that unless you're stoned and the coincidence is conducive to paranoia, the only reasonable explanation is cognitive bias. Amanda: you don't look up every word you encounter, do you? There's a certain amount of other referential material you can rely on: tone of voice, context etc...
Think about it this way: There are how many words in the english language? What's the chance that you encounter any given word on each day? It might be on the low probability, but this is SCIENTIFIC FACT. Sorry not really, just felt like channeling Miami.
"It's anchorMAN, not anchorLADY. And that is a SCIENTIFIC FACT!"
Dave: no, you're right, I don't look up every word that's new. The fact that I did look up salvo is probably what cemented it in my memory.
English has the largest vocabulary of any language!
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