I used to notice this in comic books a lot. Some time in the early months of the Marvel Universe, Stan Lee must have picked “distaff” (highfalutin adjective for “female”) as his word for the day. He used it all over the place for a few years. Another one I noticed was Man-Thing writer Steve Gerber’s over use of the exclamation, “Oh, spit!”. It’s a cute way to get around the comics code, but it’s such an odd phrase that it might serve as an individual character’s catch phrase, but how come everybody in the story is saying it?