Well, for one thing it means that I'm over-reliant on certain crutch words.
I think I was first exposed to the concept of, and perhaps the term, apophenia back when I was reading a lot of the literature of skepticism. But the encounter I first remember was either a mention in yhlee's LiveJournal or as the name of danah boyd's blog. By the time Gail Simone wrote it into an episode of Justice League I started to overcome my misgivings about it being unlisted in either Webster's New World or the OED. And then I discovered that William Gibson had put his imprimatur on it. I suspect that Gibson is at least partially responsible for the word's vogueness.
Likewise, I may have seen it in something by Michael Shermer or someone similar years back, but the first time that I clearly recall was in Gibson's Pattern Recognition. Later on in lushlush's LJ, then recently in yours, and just yesterday, while surfing, as the title of angeliska's LJ. Sad to say, I missed its Justice League debut. I don't see it in my Webster's Unabridged either (but 'apophasis' is fun, so the trip wasn't wasted). Google gives it about 600K hits with about 30K overlapping with Gibson, so you're likely right that he at least bumped its popularity if he didn't coin it. Either way, it's a great word. All I ask of a neologism is that it condense a sentence or paragraph worth of meaning without sounding silly.
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I think I was first exposed to the concept of, and perhaps the term, apophenia back when I was reading a lot of the literature of skepticism. But the encounter I first remember was either a mention in yhlee's LiveJournal or as the name of danah boyd's blog. By the time Gail Simone wrote it into an episode of Justice League I started to overcome my misgivings about it being unlisted in either Webster's New World or the OED. And then I discovered that William Gibson had put his imprimatur on it. I suspect that Gibson is at least partially responsible for the word's vogueness.
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A little digging later: coined by a neuropsychologist named Klaus Conrad in 1958. Conrad gets less than 2K hits for it...
Off topic, yhlee's LJ and Dana Boyd's blog are fun reads.
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