Falling off the precipice.

You know how when you start thinking about something, like a car you want to buy, and then you see it all over the place, all the time? Or when you get pregnant and all you see are pregnant ladies and people smoking in public?

Well, for my husband, he keeps hearing the same word all the time. It's haunting him.

It all started innocently enough. We were watching Project Runway, and Tim used the word precipice. My husband turned to me and asked, "What does that mean?"

I told him it was like a cliff. So instead of saying, "You're throwing me off a cliff, here," Tim said, "You're leading me to the precipice." (Don't quote me on my quote - this is from memory, mind you.)

After the show was over, I looked up the word to ensure I was correct because he often turns to me for word meanings, and I really don't want to tell him the wrong thing. Just last night he asked what sage means, which surprised me, and so I told him and then tried to get him to listen to a Sage Francis song where he uses a sample from some movie or documentary or something, and the guy on the sample keeps talking about what a sage is. He declined my offer.

So anyway. After the Project Runway introduction of the word precipice, my husband kept hearing it everywhere. On the radio. On podcasts. On the news. In magazines and newspapers. That word was following him. He swears he has never heard it until hearing it on the show, and also swears now he hears it all the time.

Last night as I was driving home from the BART station, I was listening to NPR. They were talking about the whole auto industry bigshots asking for huge loans from the government, and one guy said something like, "...we're being led to the precipice."

Man, I thought. Maybe that word is like the "it" word for 2008? Because while my husband is hearing it all the time, so am I. But I don't find the word as odd as he does. Odd in the sense that people are using it in everyday conversations. Like people subscribe to "thesaurus word of the day" or carry a pocket thesaurus with them so they can cleverly come up with a different word to use to impress people.

When I got home, I told him about the NPR piece and how the guy used precipice.

"See! I told you! That word is haunting me!" he said.

Maybe so. Anything is possible.