A few months ago, I noted that everyone and his brother was using the word, or phrase, “double down” — as in, “Unfazed by Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, Obama and the Democrats have decided to double down on health care.” I went my entire life without hearing “double down”; and then every human being was using it every other sentence. The phrase has been ripped from the card world and made as common as, oh . . . “intensify.”

Remember, a couple of decades ago, when everyone in Washington started to say “kabuki dance”? Everything — every process, everything remotely complicated, everything ritualistic — was a “kabuki dance.” That was like overnight. It persists, I believe.

Okay — can I tell you about a word I hear constantly now? “Unpack” — not as in taking stuff out of your suitcase, but explaining, I think. “Unpack that for me,” people will say. “Explain”? “Elaborate”?

Lexical fashion is an interesting subject, one that has interested me all my life — long before “double down,” and this new meaning of “unpack.”