How many times is too many for words?

How many times do you need to use a word in one piece of writing or speech before it's too many? 

In the novel 'We' by Yevgeny Zamyatin, a word meaning 'rose-coloured' or 'rosy' is used several times. The version on Project Gutenberg translates it in one of those two ways, and there are 27 instances (24 of rosy, 3 of rose-colored). In my copy it was translated as roseate, an uncommon word, and that was certainly enough times for me to first notice it, then become distracted by it, and eventually become annoyed by it to the point where it's the main thing I remember about the book. I'm sure in the original it's fine and probably has a stylistic purpose but it was way too high frequency for it not to stand out for me. Because it was highly salient, it's stuck in my memory extremely effectively. 

In one of the podcasts I listen to, The Knitmore Girls, one of the hosts used the word cocoon for the second time within an hour-long episode and caught herself, saying she was using that word a lot in that episode. Just two uses isn't that many, certainly not as many as 27 instances of roseate in a short novel, but it was salient enough to stick out for her and so more than once was too many.