Word of the Day: Peduncle
Does this ever happen to you? I ran across this word this morning on cnn.com in an article about somebody trying to breed the perfect pumpkin peduncle. I didn't know what it meant, and if I had to guess I would have said it sounded like the slightly weird family member that your parents never left you alone with as a child. So I looked it up, and of course it means stalk or stem. But then this afternoon I'm in a seminar about the reproductive biology of the lionfish that have been introduced along the Atlantic coast and it was used again, relative to lionfish ovaries.
posted by MarkCi @ 4:16 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
This happens to me all the time, and there is a word for it -- it was in the news in the past month or so for some reason. The rationale was that your mind's "filter" is now off to the new word, and it you're just noticing it more. But that doesn't explain why you bothered to notice it the first time. I believe that is the case for things like someone teling you to "start noticing yellow cars" and you suddenly do ... but not for other synchronicities. The one I remember best was when I was reading Infinite Jest and listening to the radio. The Eel's "Novacaine for the Soul" came on, and at the moment they said it for the first time, I flipped to a footnote in the book ... the footnote read, simply, "Novacaine for the Soul." That wasn't a filter coming off.
(But I can't remember the word, I forgot to say) ;-)
That one really is strange.
I think what people don't appreciate about "coincidences" is that there are a practically unlimited number of things that could potentially happen that you would identify as a shocking coincidence if they did. Occasionally one of these things is bound to occur, no matter how unlikely. The only strange thing would be if they didn't.
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