Like, wow.

Dear Word Detective: I’m trying to find the word the describes the following examples: When you decide to buy a red minivan then suddenly you notice all the red minivans driving around you, or when you plant a flower in your yard then suddenly you notice all the yards with the same flower planted. I’ve heard it in a seminar but can’t remember any part of the word. –Judy Ewens.

Good question. I believe the word you’re looking for is “suburbia.” More than just a locale on the fringes of big cities, “suburbia” is actually a discrete state of mind, a subset of the Jungian “collective unconscious,” manifested in rigid herd behavior. Today it might be red minivans, fifteen years ago it was those stupid “Baby on Board” signs in every car, tomorrow it’ll be, oh, epaulets on pajamas or something equally pointless. Might as well get with the program and line up for your iPhone.

Just kidding. The word you want is probably “synchronicity,” which is sort of a coincidence on steroids. The word was coined by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, to describe, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “the phenomenon of events which coincide in time and appear meaningfully related but have no discoverable causal connection.” A “synchronicity,” from the Greek “synchronos” meaning “happening at the same time,” is a coincidence that seems far too finely tuned to be mere coincidence.

One of the examples of synchronicity cited by Wikipedia (and apparently verified by multiple sources) is a genuine stunner: “During production of The Wizard of Oz, a coat bought from a second-hand store for the costume of Professor Marvel was later found to have belonged to L. Frank Baum, author of the children’s book upon which the film is based.” Ooooeeeooo.

Jung felt that such “synchronicities” were evidence of an underlying pattern or mechanism in human existence and, perhaps, even evidence of a “collective unconscious” shared by all people. Whatever the explanation, most of us have had at least a mild experience of the phenomenon. A few years ago I was reading an essay on the Russian author Anton Chekhov as I waited on a subway platform in New York City. I had just read Chekhov’s famous line “You ask, ‘What is life?’ That is like asking, ‘What is a carrot?’ A carrot is a carrot, and nothing more is known about it,” when the train entered the station. Glancing up, I noticed that the motorman was, improbably but unmistakably, eating a large orange carrot.

Blame it on the bird.

Dear Word Detective: What is the origin of the term “pie-eyed”? Apparently the word “pie” is from the printing trade meaning “a muddle of words or letters.” Does the meaning lie there? — Wendy.

Not exactly. English has two kinds of “pie.” The older “pie,” first appearing in Old English, is the original name for the bird we now call a “magpie.” Just where the “mag” came from is uncertain, but it is probably short for “Margaret,” a custom of the day being adding personal names to those of animals (e.g., Tom Turkey, Jenny Wren, etc.). The root of “pie” in English is the Latin name for the magpie, “pica,” which is related to the Latin for woodpecker, “picus.”

Magpies are known for three characteristics: their striking black and white plumage, their raucous calls, and their habit of collecting strange assortments of things in their nests (bits of string, shiny objects, etc.). The magpie’s feathers gave us the adjective “pied” in the 14th century, meaning “streaked or marked with black and white” (as in a “piebald” horse, the “bald” referring to the white patches). “Pied” was later extended to mean “multicolored,” as in the “Pied Piper” of the fable, who was dressed in clothes of many colors.

The second sort of “pie” is the familiar dish, a pastry shell filled with an assortment of ingredients, usually including either meat or fruit. This “pie” appeared in English several hundred years after “pie” meaning “magpie,” and opinions vary as to the origin of this “pie.” But the first edible “pies” were a jumble of meat and vegetables, reminiscent of a magpie’s trove of odd objects, making it probable, in the view of many authorities, that the two “pies” are actually the same word. The bird’s quirky housekeeping, in short, gave us our modern “pie.” A similar linkage ties the name of the Scottish dish “haggis” (a meat and vegetable concoction) to “haggess,” a 16th century English name for the magpie.

The printers’ term “pie” for a jumble of letters so disordered as to resemble the makings of a pie is just one of the descendants of “pie” the food (and, in fact, printers adopted the Latin name of the magpie, “pica,” for a style of type). “Pie” has also been pressed into service as a metaphor for “the whole” of anything (“They want a bigger slice of the pie”), an index of simplicity (“easy as pie,” probably referring to the eating of pie, not the making), and even a sardonic comment on promises of happiness in the afterlife (“Pie in the sky,” coined by labor organizer and troubadour Joe Hill in 1911). “Pie-eyed,” usually meaning “extremely drunk” or “extremely tired,” dates to 1900 and comes from the fixed, wide-eyed stare of the afflicted, with eyes as wide and blank as the top of a pie (“They put him down at a Table and sat around him and inhaled the Scotch until they were all Pie-Eyed,” George Ade, 1904).