Words like sunspots

First, a linguistic observation. Every few years the situation will arise where people around me start using a word that is rare, real (i.e. in a standard dictionary), and not derived from popular culture (e.g. "inconceivable" from the heyday of The Princess Bride). Last night, while bidding farewell to a friend from my Rice days who's leaving Michigan, DMB, over sangria at Casa Dominick's, the people I was with started using the word trebuchet. (For those not in-the-know, as I was not, a trebuchet is "a medieval military engine for hurling heavy missiles, as rocks".) I'd tell you what the rest of the conversation was about, but I didn't have the slightest inebriated clue at the time and I still don't. But then this afternoon, while walking around the Ann Arbor art fairs with my friend BH, she said something that I heard roughly as "yada yada yada trebuchet". Once again, I had no clue what she was talking about. (Blame the heat.) But I thought, how weird is that?

The last time this kind of thing happened to me was in high school, after I locked my keys in my car and started calling any friends whose numbers I could remember for help (from a nearby mattress store's phone -- no cell phones yet). As luck would have it, my friend EP was home and was able to pick me up, with a friend of hers in tow. And for whatever reason, I used the word cravat ("a band or scarf worn around the neck") with her on the phone. Later on, at EP's house, just a little down the street from my parents', the three of us were hanging out in her room and her friend said "[something] [something] [something] cravat". EP noted that she had never heard this word so often in her life as she had that afternoon -- she often made observations like that. When BH said trebuchet today, I felt the same way. It was tres weird.

As a side note, I was reading about the constellation Aquila tonight while elliptical-ing at the gym, and the stars Alshain and Tarazed were described as Altair's epaulets. That's another strange word, meaning "an ornamental fringed shoulder pad formerly worn as part of a military uniform" or in other words the defining characterstic of a Member's Only jacket. (Interestingly, you can still buy a Member's Only jacket on Amazon. I guess the club's still taking applications.) I haven't had a freaky high frequency word usage experience with this word yet, but I think it's in the running. At the current rate of having this phenomenon happen once every twelve years or so, almost like the sunspot cycle, I expect to be 42 for the next one. (Shudder.)

In other news, as I mentioned up top, I veni-vidi-vici'ed my way through the art fairs this afternoon. I reckon I saw two hundred or so booths and came away being interested in about five percent of those. Of those five percent, the one to which I felt the most drawn was Zu Sheng Yu's. Apparently he's something of an inventor as well as a painter, and one invention of his is a method to represent music as colors. In his paintings he uses one-meter square canvases and fills most of the space with scenery, which I equate with a rhythm section, while reserving a small portion for a speck of a thing which I equate with a melody. You can see an example here. Great stuff. I also made one purchase this afternoon, a shirt made by the folks at Made in Ann Arbor on South University. They make by far the least kitschy and most attractive shirts I've ever seen with the words "Ann Arbor" on them. And I've seen a few.