vuja de

One of the interesting things about blogging is that it is a good way to keep track of notes and ideas and to start making connections between them. After some time, you start to notice that one post leads to another, about something related you've seen somewhere else (and sometimes you're rewarded with nice little surprises). While writing the posts about noticing, here and here, they remind me that I had read this post in Tom Kelley's FC blog some time ago. As he said, everybody knows what "déjà vu" means, right? It is that strange feeling that you have seen something before. Well, when going out to do field work, in "anthropologist" mode, so to speak, you should aspire to the opposite, you should go with the state of mind of "vuja de". "Vuja de" is "the distinct sense that, somehow, something that just happened has never happened before". It is about seeing the world with fresh eyes. What a great term! Vuja de...it stayed in my mind.
Well, I googled "vuja de" to find out who had originally coined it. The answer? George Carlin (hah, who else?). The guy is genius.