"I think it's a phase of our time," said Harold Koda, the costume curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
He did go through a phase of saying "bra" every time he looked at a woman, but that was surely just a coincidence.
Ms. Jones did recall one daughter of a former dancer who went through a phase of falling onstage every time she knew her mother was in the audience.
"Every person," she said, "is a new universe, unique with its own laws emphasising some belief, a phase of life immersed in time and rapidly passing by".
I was heavily dug into a phase of pretension at the time all my friends started getting into it, and made such a fuss about how crap and self-congratulatory it was that I couldn't ever sign up, even years later when, at times, I imagine I could have enjoyed it.
But more specifically, it also refers to a phase of 19th-century French painting, a time when artists rejected the idealizing tendencies and historical subjects of romanticism and sought to paint true, accurate representations of daily life.
The part of the mark that exists — looking at times like a phase of the moon — must be extrapolated.
This year, though, The Times launched a phase of the venture in which the curriculum is produced entirely by The Times newsroom.
The label X mark the arrival times of a phase of unknown origin.
There is now "compelling evidence", according to an influential group of geologists, that humans have had such an impact on the planet that we are entering a new phase of geological time: the Anthropocene.
