meet the wankers

With reference to this BBC News story about "name meshing" as practised by zany modern people getting married I'll just say: I thought of it first! Except that I didn't, because this Telegraph article from November 2012 reckons that people in America had already been doing it for six years. Oh well.

A couple of other things: it's interesting, if you watch the video, to see what a relatively large proportion of the couples doing interesting mashups of their names are same-sex couples. I imagine that there's maybe a sense of being less weighed down by the baggage of "tradition" in these cases, since the whole idea of same-sex unions is pretty recent (and I acknowledge that there's some way to go yet), and therefore a bit more of a sense of freedom to make your own rules. Or it could be pure chance, and that could just be bollocks. Who knows.

The other thing is that the BBC article makes a reference to lovable showbiz couple Chris O'Dowd and Dawn Porter having done this when they got married in August 2012. That's not quite right, as it happens, as while she seems to have adopted the name Dawn O'Porter, apparently seriously, he remains resolutely Chris O'Dowd, so it's not really a very good example. If they were following the rules (inasmuch as there are any) it really ought to be something like O'Dorter or O'Dowter anyway, the general convention being roughly half of each of the original names plus whatever mucking about with the bit in the middle you need to do to make it pleasing/pronounceable/amusing.

Clearly these rules can lead to some amusing imaginary celebrity pairings. I'll start you off with rock'n'roll pioneer Carl Perkins (whose 81st birthday it would have been today, had he not died in 1998) and tennis star Chris Evert becoming Carl and Chris Pervert, and stylist Gok Wan and actress Zoe Lucker becoming Gok and Zoe Wanker. No doubt you can make up your own.