It is a common but striking experience to encounter a word or idea or factoid for the first time in your life and then immediately run across it again, seemingly against all probability.
There are several names for this experience:
Diegogarcity - The concept is close to Serendipity. Serendipity is named after an old name for the island of Sri Lanka (Sarandib), Diego Garcia is another island close to Sri Lanka.
Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon - In 1986 Terry Mullen wrote about his experiencing this phenomenon with the Baader-Meinhof Group (or Red Army Faction), a violent political gang in West Germany. The story was published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press which soon received a flood of similar stories and coined the term Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon to collect them.
Frequency Illusion - A linguist named Arnold Zwicky coined the term and explained that it was the result of three very human traits:
1. Gathering and sifting through tremendous amounts of information
2. High sensitivity to patterns and to assuming potential patterns
3. The tendency to filter incoming data to select for things that fit a previously assumed pattern.
Brief and mostly accurate explanations of things.
