This keeps happening. I serendipitously [i.e., by a surprising/unsought/unanticipated route or conjunction] discover a term or concept that efficiently labels something I’ve been doing or saying for a long time. Such nexus events connect me to a discourse I hadn’t recognized or heeded, and allow me to recognize what I do as “a kind of a…” I’m pretty sure this happens to everybody, but I at least haven’t paid much heed to it before now. For example…

When I first encountered the term ‘blog’ (sometime during my Fall 2002 sabbatical, long after I should [as an information professional…] have been aware of the phenomenon/practise/community-of-discourse), I realized that my long-running practise of keeping log files was essentially the same activity, though it wasn’t until this month that I began to explore blogging software (due to various institutional limitations yadda yadda) –and tehre are still facets of the blogosphere (like RSS) that I’m pretty hazy about. But I’m gradually putting more of it together, and pennies continue to drop. And now I see that bloggery is of a piece with journal keeping and Ann Berthoff’s dialectical notebooks.
Similarly with two terms I started to explore only a couple of weeks ago, as the fortuitous result of a class exercise: chronotope and architectonic. These two provide a handy shorthand for the 4-space notions I’ve been working with for 35+ years, and the all-connects-to-all model that I find most pleasing and heuristic.