Following on from the first Eponymy in August of the year, here’s another about weird quirks of psychology related to memory and observation.
The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon (yes, it has its own page; hat tip to the Pacific Standard for that) is also known as the frequency illusion. This phenomenon happens when you hear about something new or different, and then it immediately starts to pop up frequently again and again. In the age of surveillance capitalism, this is often now done intentionally, but the Baader-Meinhof also happens in environments far outside the reach of targeted advertising.
Linguist Arnold Zwicky, who coined “frequency illusion”, neatly summed it up as,
“Once you notice a phenomenon, you believe it happens a whole lot.”
Andreas Baader was West German radical who, alarmed by the fascistic tendencies of postwar capitalism, carried out a small bombing campaign in 1968 and was quickly jailed for it. In 1970 Baader escaped from prison with the help of journalist Ulrike Meinhof. The two and several others formed a terrorist cell which they called the Red Army Faction, but were widely known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang (or -Group). The group’s founders were all arrested in 1972 after a series of bank robberies and bombings. Meinhof committed suicide in prison during her trial in 1975, and Baader did the same in 1977 while serving a life sentence, after a failed attempt by sympathizers to exchange a hijacked plane full of hostages for the RAF’s founders.
While the group continued their campaigns without the first generation of leaders, their influence gradually tapered off, especially weakened by German reunification, and officially dissolved in 1998.
The coinage of this eponymous phrase is an unlikely one — though completely in line with Stigler’s Law of Eponymy — because there’s nothing about the group itself that is relevant to the phenomenon it gives name to. In 1994, long after the glory days of the RAF were behind it, an anonymous poster on the St. Paul Minnesota Pioneer Press comment board claimed to have heard about the Baader-Meinhof Gang twice in 24 hours with no discernible connection, and dubbed it the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. The term first became a meme on the comment board (being applicable to all similar coincidences), then leaked out to the Internet as a whole.