apophenia
Spam sucks. Zephyr must shortly retire. In comes apophenia, thanks to worthless word of the day.
apophenia: the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things; seeing patterns where none, in fact, exist
This word was coined by K. Conrad in 1958 in a Jungian context, but has regained currency due to William Gibson’s recent novel, _Pattern Recognition_.(you may remember Gibson as the author of the seminal cyberpunk tale, _Neuromancer_)
“There must always be room for conicidence, Win had maintained. When there’s not, you’re probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of consipracy. And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he’d believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always, [Cayce] knew, took for granted was there.” William Gibson, _Pattern Recognition_
