Doppelgangers and the Meaning of Your First Name
This week on Facebook started as Doppelganger Week where you are supposed to change your profile picture to that of a celebrity that you closely resemble, or have been told that you closely remember. The oddly semi-narcissistic trend swept Facebook with people posting all kinds of interesting doppelganger choices.
Facebook being what it is though, by mid-week this trend had been replaced with Urban Dictionary week. Go to their website, type in your first name, and it will tell you the meaning of your first name. Urbandictionary.com has clearly recognized the North American penchant for entertaining, but extremely useless entertainment.
While I think both trends are fun, I didn’t participate for a small handful of reasons. Firstly, I don’t like some of my doppelgangers. I can’t post a picture of Mickey Dolenz on my profile without a small part of my ego dying, and my other doppelganger, Colin Farrell, is a bit too arrogant of a choice. If people get wind that I actually believe I resemble him (I don’t — for the record), I will never live it down. Either way I don’t want to deal with the fallout. As for the meaning of my first name? I honestly don’t really care.
I do, however, think that the first name meaning trend is a genius stroke of traffic boosting on the part of Urban Dictionary. The Doppelganger trend probably benefited nobody in particular, but I would say that there has been a significant increase in the number of people who now know what a doppelganger is.
Time to find a new word.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Social Media and tagged with Doppelganger, Facebook, First Name Meaning, Urban Dictionary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.