You learn a brand new word at breakfast, and by dinner it somehow shows up in a podcast, a billboard, and a stranger's text.
It feels like the universe is nudging you, like the word was hiding and just got caught the second you noticed it existed.
Psychologists call this the frequency illusion, and it happens because your brain quietly starts hunting for a pattern it just learned to recognize.
The word wasn't rare at all, your attention just switched on for it while everything else stayed background noise.
The more common name for this trick, the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, comes from a strangely unrelated source.
A 1994 newspaper forum commenter mentioned hearing about the German militant group twice in one day, and the odd label just stuck.
So the next time a word seems to be stalking you, it's really just your own selective attention quietly doing its job.