A single example, plucked at random from a lifetime's supply: years ago, after I'd been bickering with a friend who was visiting my flat in London, she fell silent for several minutes and then, pointing to my wooden floors, observed, "You know that floor's laminate, don't you?" (It was laminate. I'd been lying to myself for years that it was pine).
I recently plucked up the courage to ask a GP about it and he looked blank.
Helicopter crews in both cities plucked to safety people who had been stranded in cars and on top of buildings.
Its idyllic setting seems plucked from another era.
Each year I have plucked the papery heads, their cargo of flaked almond-like seeds shaking inside, to further distribute them.
The only animal Ozzy put inside his mouth during his stay was chicken, and he had it served up just like everybody else in the hotel: plucked and cooked.
Efe Obada, who has been plucked from his job as a security guard in southern England to sign for the Dallas Cowboys, has described his move as a "dream".
In Los Angeles, the figure often quoted is 85,000 but this, I discovered last year, was a number plucked from the air by another LA correspondent and is a pure guess.
They don't deal in eggs at Sheepdrove, so they buy in day-old chicks, at which stage they are not organic - there isn't yet the supply of organic chicks available in this country - but, with the Soil Association's blessing, they will become organic by the time they leave the farm, plucked, trussed and packed.
To read the new conviction report in detail is to enter a kind of alternate reality, where concrete facts appear ignored and alternate facts are seemingly plucked from the air.
Blatter has been at Fifa for 40 years, since his now disgraced predecessor João Havelange personally plucked him from watchmaker Longines to lead the commercialisation of the World Cup that has seen revenues rise in direct correlation with endless claims of bribery and kickbacks.
