Heh, this made me think of Tale of Two Cities. While I don’t remember if the two highly similar fellows in the story were indeed twins, one of them turns out to be the son of some particularly mean French nobleman, and also happens to be in love with this nice English girl. Anyhow, he gets arrested by the revolutionaries, and the night before he’s supposed to be executed, the other one bribes the guards, knocks him out, and takes his place (managing to fall in love with the girl in line in front of him while they wait to be executed the next morning).
Damn that was a depressing book.
Hehe, I knew a set of twins who were named Hunter and Tanner. I was the only one who thought that was funny, and trying to explain the apparant joke to this set of mental powerhouses was a lost cause.
In my experience, cousins tend to look alike more often than siblings. Met a set of female cousins (not my cousins, eachother’s cousins) who we could only tell apart because one had slightly lighter colored hair. Also, they wore different colored bikinis (yep, noticed that too ) That said, the likelyhood of a set of cousins getting switched on accident by their parents seems fairly slim.
My experience was similar to China Guy’s. Our boys were named before they were born, and yet were tagged Twin A and Twin B by the hospital (policy, they told us, until the names were legally registered). In our case, we knew who was who because one was slightly larger than the other (8 lb 5 oz and 7 lb 6 oz!! ). Of course, I did have to correct the nurse who, after measuring one of the boys as I held the other, went to put him into the wrong [labelled] cradle.
This is embarassing, but on an episode of Full House, Uncle Jesse takes off the “stupid looking” hats his wife put on the babies to be able to tell them apart, and ends up having to take their footprints to identify them.
Nail polish would be my answer too. Just paint one set of toes pink and another set purple and you are all squared away. And nail polish on little toes that don’t walk would take a long long time to wear away, so you wouldn’t have to repaint too often.
At least, that’s what my dog’s trainer (who is also a breeder) does when she’s got a new litter. All the little white samoyed puppies got colored dots on their bums. She had yellow girl, red girl, blue boy, etc.
This time she got 7 pups…and felt horrible that she ran out of marker colors and had to have a “black boy” (and refer to it as that!)
I’m an identical twin, born in the early 80s, and my parents didn’t know of my existence until five days before I was born. Yep, through all the ultrasounds, my head was thought to be my sister’s… knee. They knew they were getting a girl though, and decided to name her after an old friend.
On discovering the existence of the second babe (me), mum ducked into the bar across the road and had a gin and tonic, the first and only drink of her pregnancy. A second name was needed, and fast. Hence, I’m named after the hospital receptionist, whose name, luckily, didn’t rhyme with my twin sister’s.
I also have a pair of twin friends called Sonia and Sonita. Yep, one letter difference, and no middle names. They have terrible trouble convincing the bureaucracy that they are two different people – for example, they have had their bank accounts combined more than once. Their parents didn’t know they were twins until the birth. They had already chosen the name Sonia and their almost-illiterate father named the second without realising how similar the names were.
It is believed, but not proven that there is a form of twinning called “polar twins”. It would happen when the egg splits and is then fertilized by two different sperm. That would mean “half-identical” twins. The Olsen twins have been suspected to be this type of twin.
So, how do you feel about that? Does it bother you that they just picked a name for you completely at random? That your sister got the name they planned on giving a daughter?
Hmmmm. Twin A and Twin B.
Is that anything like Thing 1 and Thing 2?
The complete arbitrariness of names bothers me for some reason. It would seem that people are frequently named for ridiculous reasons. Of course, babies are often made the same way, so…
Re the Olsen twins. IMO, they look scarey. I do not see the attractiveness at all. Just sayin’
Heh. This is embarassing (though maybe not as much so as the Full House memory above), but on MTV’s Made the other day, the girl was named Alaric. And she really was kinda…well…gothy.
:smack: One of my close friends is a twin ( and so is her sister )
There are pictures of them right up until high school that even they cannot tell you who is who.
I find that so fascinating.
(and when I met my friends sister for the first time, like a moran, I blurted out, " Hey, you look just like Rachel!" :smack: )
Maybe my moniker isn’t enough–I would only be interested in the Olsen twins IF they were male–and a sight more good looking.
Or does the novelty of twins outweigh the attractiveness of either twin?
I have sisters who are twins, born when I was in high school. I was highly involved in their naming, tagging and distintiveness training. The names we settled on were Caroline and Linda (born naturally, by the way–I disagree that ‘most’ twins are born by C-section). Caroline was born first, and she received the name higher in the alphabet. So my sisters can say why they received the names they did: they were born in alphabetical order.
We purchased nice bracelets with their names in beads to know who was who for the first several months. One of the bracelets broke early on, but no matter: No Bracelet Baby was always same one.
To solve the picture problem, we always placed Linda on the Left (as one would later view the photo) so everyone knows, to this day, who’s who. The problem is the random, one-kid shots, but this didn’t happen much until they were older–and began to acquire individual markings (a tiny scar on the forehead, in the case of Caroline).
) That said, the likelyhood of a set of cousins getting switched on accident by their parents seems fairly slim.
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