I've been thinking about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, and I do not believe that the distribution of the mentions of any particular discrete concept is uniform throughout cultural space. Nor is the distribution purely random (which is similar, but would allow for random clusters).
I think there really are clusters of "Baader-Meinhofs", where there is a cultural background that was previously seeded with it, and a sort of viral person-to-person transmission taking place over this background, and then when some threshold is reached or some mysterious mental button is triggered, we suddenly notice it. Most of it was there all along, but not all of it.
But I could be wrong.
A boomer apologizes, albeit without much clarity.
"It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs," Jesus said; Matthew 15:26.
I recently understood that I am spending my life in rebuilding spiritual and practical foundations that had been foolishly undermined by previous generations.
Several months ago I was reading a nonfiction book by Christian author Paul Tournier, and made it about three-quarters of the way through before being drawn away to other things.
When I picked it up this last week and finished reading it, I found references to about a dozen Bible passages that had come up in my daily Bible readings in the interim, mostly obscure Old Testament personages with a variety of afflictions; Tournier was a Swiss doctor famous for connecting his Christianity with his medical practice.
I also read a Christian fiction book this last week: Deadline, by Randy Alcorn. One day, what I read in the book mirrored my morning Bible reading on that same day.
"A work of creation was three-fold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly; the Creative Idea, timeless and passionate, which is the image of the Father; the Creative Energy, begotten of the idea and working in time, which is the image of the Word; the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the individual soul, which is the image of the indwelling Spirit."
-- P. D. James, summarizing Dorothy L. Sayers' description
