5/18/12: What's a brevet?

Brevet. An interesting word, perhaps the name of a freckly and rambunctious redhead boy. It means to be promoted euphemistically, sort of how flipping burgers now makes you a "Food Preparation Specialist."

Anyway.

I was reading a book recently, and it brought "brevet" to mind, for No Real Reason. At the time, however, I couldn't remember the word, nor what it meant, only that there was a word I had looked up a few months ago and that this word was now nagging me to death. For days this phantom word bugged me, making shapes from my subconscious like a cat under a quilt.

Then, after three nag-filled days, I happened to (very randomly) come across the word in my word ledger: "brevet." I recognized it at once. Queue "Hallelujah."

This was enough to net it a "word synchronicity" entry in my log, with my mysterious remembrance of it occurring so close to when I would happen across it in my ledger review (which I do linearly, between the several such word-definition ledgers I've amassed). However, it wasn't upgraded to blog-post status until a few hours later, when "brevet" turned up in the book I was still reading, the very one that had dislodged it from my subconscious.

As it were, the only time I'd seen "brevet" used was in the novel that originally spawned the word-ledger entry, and then in the latter book, which spawned this post.