Steve in Neenah, Wisconsin, says he’d not heard the term suss out in a long time, but then suddenly he was hearing again it in several different places. What he’s experiencing is the frequency illusion, also known as the Baader-Meinhof...
After you notice a certain word for the first time, chances are you’ll start seeing it all over the place. That’s known as the frequency illusion, coined by linguist Arnold Zwicky, and it happens because of confirmation bias. This is...
Martha and Grant share a couple of favorite online sources for reading about language: Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words newsletter and Arnold Zwicky’s blog. Be sure to check out Zwicky’s post, “Dialect dangerous to...