Word Patterns

Cover of Sea Change

Do you ever notice patterns in the ways that words present themselves to you randomly? It has always been something that has caught my attention.

There are the obvious examples, when someone that you know well or listen to on a regular basis repeats certain words or phrases. Kamenitzer says "at the end of the day," my supervisor at Wolf Trap, Shawn, says "with respect to," and so on. These aren't really bad things, they are just things that stand out for me. I'm sure there are things that I say repeatedly that strike people as strange.

Then there are the weirder ones that you might have not heard much or at all, and then suddenly present themselves to you in a short amount of time:

Recently, I've noticed the phrase "Sea Change" a few times too many, since I've never seen or read that phrase ever, at lease consciously, until this year. First, I read it in the book that I read for my marketing class, "Microtrends," by Mark Penn. The first time I read it, I thought it was a typo and was supposed to say "Sea of change," which I still didn't know was a thing, but thought sounded more normal. But then I read it in there a few more times in there and decided that it must be pollster lingo. But then I heard it on the radio... Guess it's a real thing. Then, randomly, I was listening to Beck today, and one of their albums apparently is named "Sea Change." Weird.