Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Randomness

One day last week Matt and I were driving somewhere and somehow we started talking about the word "detente," lowercase -- we can't remember what brought it up, but we talked about it for a few minutes. Later on the same car ride I was telling him how much Amanda liked "Rent" and he said it was right up her "wheelhouse," which was a term I'd never heard before. He told me it was common in sports.

Later that night we were kind of watching "Boston Legal" when they said something about declaring detente. Right after that we watched "House" and they referred to a wheelhouse in some context. It was pretty weird to have just talked about two fairly uncommon terms and then for both of them to come up two hours later.

You know how sometimes, at least in a smallish town like ours, if there's a car that really stands out, you start to see it everywhere? When we were in high school there was this red convertible with the license place Sunny T, driven by an old man, that we used to see EVERYwhere. But you know you probably pass by all the other cars equally often; Sunny T just stands out because he's easily recognizable. Well, we figured that was probably what was going on with "detente" and "wheelhouse."

To test the theory we decided to pick an equally arbitrary word ("innocuous") and see if we noticed it being used the next day. We didn't, and in fact I still haven't heard anyone use it since then. So maybe the detente/wheelhouse thing was just a funny coincidence, I don't know.

Thank you for sticking with me on my boring days.

P.S. If you like to read blogs and you don't use Google Reader to do so, you should check it out immediatement. It's so much more efficient than the one-by-one method.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was reading this on Google Reader. :)

Ally said...

My friend called this serendipitous awareness, and I've intended to write a post about it for (literally) years now. He abbreviated it as "S.A." and likened the phenomena to reverse deja vu with a bit of kismet thrown in. It's like something wants to be known almost.

Jennifer Kirby said...

Serendipitous awareness -- what a great term!