On Wednesday night, at a party for The Weekly Standard, I met some people who have twins out there (As one of them put it: “Google ghosts”). One of the gentlemen was Stephen Schwartz, the author of The Two Faces of Islam : Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism. But if you Google him, you’re more likely to get composer Stephen Schwartz. Another guy standing there said if you Google him, you get a jazz guitarist in San Francisco.
I didn’t think Google ghosts had quite the right ring, so instead I proposed the word Googleganger. It’s inspired by the word doppelgänger, which means “double goer” in German and usually refers to an eerie double of a person.
In other neologism news, on the radio this morning, I heard a DJ on one of the local urban contemporary radio stations refer to his nickname for his iPod. He calls it a DORM: Death of Radio Machine.
UPDATE: You know, it helps to use Google. Of course, it turns out I’m not the first person to think of this phrase.