You know how you come across a word you don’t know and then look it up and then suddenly you start to notice the word everywhere, as if the whole world is responding to the new information you’ve just acquired? Well, a couple months ago I was reading Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group (1954) and, on the first page, came across this incredibly long kick-ass sentence (which, in addition to containing the word in question [I’ve bolded it], will give you a full sense of what The Group is all about):

They were in the throes of discovering New York, imagine it, when some of them had actually lived here all their lives, in tiresome Georgian houses full of waste space in the Eighties or Park Avenue apartment buildings, and they delighted in such out-of-the-way corners as this, with its greenery and Quaker meeting-house in red brick, polished brass, and white trim next to the wine-purple Episcopal church—on Sundays, they walked with their beaux across the Brooklyn Bridge and poked into the sleepy Heights section of Brooklyn; they explored residential Murray Hill and quaint McDougal Alley and Patchin Place and Washington Mews with all the artists’ studios; they loved the Plaza Hotel and the fountain there and the green mansarding of the Savoy Plaza and the row of horsedrawn hacks and elderly coachmen, waiting, as in a French Place, to tempt them to a twilight right through Central Park.

I read that and then stood up and went to my huge, semi-trusty, illustrated American Heritage and found the entry for “mansard”:

If you can’t read that, the definition is: “A roof having two slopes on all four sides, with the lower slope almost vertical and the upper almost horizontal. Also called a ‘mansard roof.’”

Imagine my delight when putting on the Vampire Weekend record a month or two after stumbling upon the word in The Group, with its marvelous first song “Mansard Roof,” which itself begins: I see a mansard roof through the trees… The word is back! It had its day in the sunshine back when The Group was a best-seller, and it’s having another day in the sunshine now. (Tonight.)