Partly it's a copying and adopting mechanism. Words become fashionable. One obvious phrase used in the media that has been recently been adopted in the last 10

Partly it's a copying and adopting mechanism. Words become fashionable. One obvious phrase used in the media that has been recently been adopted in the last 10 years is "optics": https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07FOB-onlanguage-t.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07FOB-onlanguage... (Dark patterns was first adopted in 2010, for example) Partly it's pattern recognition on your/our behalf. We notice something new, then something again, and there's a pattern. Without actual data on the frequency of words and phrases we wouldn't really know either way. Similar to those charts / graphs of NYT could be a good start, but for HN e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981380 Maybe the search results below could be hacked?