Amazing fact
Now, die-hard followers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that I’m a voracious reader. Firstly, it’s my job. Secondly, it’s also my hobby! So it should come as a dramatic and astonishing shock to you all that today, I came across a word for the first time in 25 years: ambit, which according to Webster’s means “circuit, compass; or the bounds or limits of a place or district; or a sphere of action, expression, or influence.” I read it earlier in the day in this post from the Boston Globe’s Brainiac blog. (Extra bonus: in addition to including a brand new word, the whole post was a takedown of the obnoxiously nauseating Megan McArdle. Ding ding ding!)
This is all well and good. The story enters the realm of the amazing, though, when you learn that five minutes later, in a completely unrelated blog post (this time from the Awl’s Shadow Editors), I came across the term “ambit” for the second time in 25 years. (Technically, the word appeared in this Ross Douthat column in the Times, but I technically didn’t read that. Well, not technically. I just straight up didn’t read it.)
Irregardless.
There are plenty of words that I don’t know. More than plenty! This isn’t about that, though. Isn’t it a crazy wacky coincidence that I can go my whole reading life without encountering a word, and then I’ll see it twice in the same day? Is ambit going to smash back into the lexicon? If you think I’m not going to start using it every day, you’re fooling yourself.
Tags: amazing coincidences, ambit, words
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 11:54 pm and is filed under Reading and Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.