"Mere repetition made things to me rather more weird than more rational. It was as if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it as an accident, I had then seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape. I should have fancied for a moment that it must be some local secret society. So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot." -- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, ch. 4 the Ethics of Elfland
One odd nose here or there is an oddity. Six odd noses in a row is a conspiracy.
A baboon's bottom observed in obscurity is bizarre, but in a herd by the hundred is a coup d'etat, something is going on there. And so it is with the world God made. Odd things happen here and there, but they often happen with enough regularity and repetition that one should wonder, "What's going on here?"
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