In any type of file edited with VIM, I am seeing an unwanted pattern highlighted everywhere and I don't know how to turn just that pattern off. Or perhaps I corrupted a file accidentally. It seems like this happened recently after my thrashing around, experimenting with multiple windows (red herring?).
The pattern seems to be: the letter e plus one character of any kind ("eg", "el", "e.", etc)
To clear the highlight where text matches the last search pattern type :nohls