Sharing Your Name With A Celebrity
In real life, she is an comedian. On screen, she is a policewoman in a TV series.
I never watched the series, but I find it increasingly difficult to escape her, because we have at least one thing in common, our last name, and we now share pages on Google, and Yahoo, and search engines in general. I must say that for a long time, she was the one getting all the blanket.
But the story goes on.
Hardly a day passes, when I meet someone and have to give my name, as it happened today, without the question arising in various forms:
‘Are you a relative of…?’
‘Do you spell it like…?’
‘Like…….’ *wink*
It used to be men who would ask me, with that funny gleam in their eyes. Now women too are asking me.
It’s boring. I tried using it to rate people’s cultural standards. If you ask me about my connection with her, then I rate you as sub par. But that’s unfair, because some people are quite capable of watching popular series about policewomen, and have intelligent conversations on other topics. End of cultural test.
However, it says a lot about being notorious, albeit not a full-fledged celebrity. Over the centuries, several spellings have emerged for my -our- last name, depending on the part of France it originated from. Now everyone seems to know only one spelling: hers -and mine. She is becoming the reference for us all. I am sure that those with a name spelled differently are having a hard time. ‘What, you don’t spell your name like…?’
My question is now: will there be a time, when people will meet her and ask her:
‘Are you a relative of this famous translator?’
‘Do you spell it like the famous translator’s name?’
I doubt it.
Photo courtesy of this site (Italian):
http://www.lavinium.com/italiano/comandante_florent.shtml
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February 3rd, 2008 at 3:46 am
De facto standard, sort of
Sometimes people say “You look like ***.” (*** is someone on TV or movies), and I don’t like that. *** looks like me.
February 3rd, 2008 at 7:44 am
Argh, that’s annoying too! I read somewhere that each one of us has 6 or 7 lookalikes. I don’t know how they can tell. When I was younger, people thought I looked like another actress. But we are all different!
February 3rd, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Un article que je détourne un peu, ce soir (heure de Paris ;)), article qui m’a bien fait sourire !
February 3rd, 2008 at 8:48 pm
Merci de m’avoir prévenue, comme ça je suis allée faire un petit tour sur ton blog… J’ai un peu de mal à m’y retrouver, mais il fourmille d’idées intéressantes.