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  • poppelganger: portmanteau word that combines popstar and doppelganger and references the need for celebrities to have at least one degree of separation between them and the roles they play.

    reference: Slate article "Doppelganger pop" by Jonah Weiner:

    http://www.slate.com/id/2205350/pagenum/all/#p2

    November 28, 2008

  • And here was me thinking a German clone is stalking my beloved popcorn machine.

    November 28, 2008

  • Ooh, that Jonah. So many words. So little substance.

    November 28, 2008

  • "The pop doppelgänger is not, of course, Beyoncé's innovation. Mariah Carey has Mimi, Eminem has Slim Shady, David Bowie had Ziggy Stardust, to name only a few. The impulse among musicians to create doubles—call them poppelgänger—is decades old, and it highlights one of pop music's basic contradictions: the way every performer, to some degree, becomes another person in order to express something true about himself."

    - from the article referenced below.

    Mit umlaut, bitte!

    November 28, 2008

  • Bilby has done something quite interesting. If one goes to the Weiner article, the sentence in question is (verbatim):

    The impulse among musicians to create doubles — call them poppelgängers — is decades old

    Why did bilby drop the 's'? I'm guessing it's because he knows, being the erudite marsupial that he is, that poppelgänger is already a plural form.

    Which raises the question - was Weiner wrong to have written "poppelgängers"? How do we pluralize our foreign loanwords? Do we speak of our multiple doppelgänger or doppelgängers? Or maybe if we wanna be bad boiz, we could write doppelgängerz?

    December 1, 2008

  • With the umlaut, no s; without the umlaut, plural with s.

    December 1, 2008

  • On Wordie, poppelgangerh.

    December 1, 2008

  • pro! Behave!

    December 1, 2008

  • It's usually the Latin ones that have traps built in: stamina, prospectus, etc. List, anyone...?

    December 1, 2008

  • Sprung :-(

    December 1, 2008

  • I remember Popples... big in the 80's and by the creators who brought us the Care Bears. I wonder if there's a connection...

    December 1, 2008

  • The same guys? Really? I loved Popples.

    December 1, 2008

  • --Prologus, Yeah, I'm 99% sure it's true. Once one suspects this, one realizes they actually look very similar. (Care Bears and Popples, that is).

    December 2, 2008