Thursday, October 23, 2008

Deja Nouveau

Is there a word for when you learn something new, something you didn't know about before, and then all of a sudden you start to notice it all around you? It's always been there, around you, but it didn't stand out before. And so once you learned about that person, place or thing, you suddenly start to notice it all over and it feels like it's just popped into this world. You kind of get that feeling of "wow, this thing is suddenly all over the place!". In reality, it's always been there, but since you didn't know what it was, it just blended into the background and to your mind...your brain...it was pretty much invisible. You know what I mean?

I'm sure this is a common thing, as it happens to me so often. I just got curious if there was a word for this. Kind of like 'deja vu' is used to describe the feeling of having done/seen something before. If there's no official word to describe this, then I'll suggest "deja nouveau" ("already new") just because it sounds like it fits. :)

1 comment:

superlative said...

I think this is called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (not as catchy as déjà nouveau, I know).

And I get it all the time too!