Osher, or Andrew, Gunsberg
is an enthusiastic player of the what's-in-a-name-game. Picture: Glen
McCurtayne/Coleman-Rayner Source: Supplied
Kerry Parnell, The Daily Telegraph, reports
What’s with all this name-changing business? Once upon a time, the rules were clear. If you wanted to be a celebrity you would ditch your duff name and pick something more glamorous, like Norma Jeane Mortenson to Marilyn Monroe, Reginald Dwight to Elton John or Archibald Leach to Cary Grant.
Simple. And if you happened to be the hapless offspring of overenthusiastic celebrity parents, you'd reverse the process - binning off your absurd name and going for something much more sensible, such as Zowie Bowie to Duncan Jones. Expect Apple Martin to be Edna any day now.
But now there's a whole new disturbing trend, to keep changing your name, over and over like some kind of warp-speed Twitter feed.
Well that's just greedy.
Andrew Gunsberg is one. He's on his fourth name now - first we knew him as Andy G, a nice Aussie-sounding name just made for the blonde hunky host of Australian Idol in 2003. Then he became Andrew G, followed a few years later with his Umlaut Period, when presumably we were all multicultural enough to cope with his surname Andrew Gunsberg.
And now, folks, we've gone full circle and brought back the very name he was born with - Osher Gunsberg.
Well, make your mind up, mate. What's that all about?
Perhaps he's taking inspiration from other such luminaries as Sean Combs, Puff Daddy, P.Diddy, Diddy, Puffy or whatever the Puff you call him now. I can't keep up. Do you think he ever met Ken Dodd? I suspect not.
He in turn infected Snoop Dogg, aka, Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr no less, who has upgraded his own ferocity and would now like to be known as Snoop Lion. Must have run out of canine puns.
I do think expecting the general public to embrace the newly-named you is taking yourself a little seriously. I mean, who does that in real life?
There are very few occasions where you can just rename yourself and not look like a total knob. A few people try it, usually at university, introducing themselves by their exotic new name and ridding themselves of their past.
But it rarely works, as there's that little problem of all those friends and relatives who keep popping up from the past and insisting on addressing you as Karen, not Karin, Amanda, or Portia.
I once worked on a magazine with a woman who had a fabulous-sounding name - let's call her Persephone Brown - much to the envy of her colleagues who had far less byline-worthy monikers. That is until her mum kept calling up and asking to speak to Tracey.
It's one thing to have a tremendous name worthy of a film star or author - my nephew is called Rocco Rivetti which is all kinds of marvellous - but not if you gave it to yourself.
And certainly not if you decide to keep changing it. No, no, you only get one chance at being poncy, not 10. Anyway, it didn't work for Prince, did it? As soon as he changed his name to squiggle, a symbol no one could pronounce, we all stopped talking about him. And he's spent the rest of his days ignored, weeping over his billions. Probably.
No comments:
Post a Comment