This post is not about the interesting problem of googlegangers, a term some have adapted from Dopplegangers, a concept from German that conceptualizes someone who looks like me but isn't me. For many purposes on the internet and elsewhere, my name is me. So, a googleganger is a person with my exact name other than me. No, this post is about name duplication and about applications of a name to very different things.
This post is about the more common situation where a name is applied to two very different things. Sometimes, confusion can result. As a teen, I dated Bonnie. My parents thought I saw her too much. They thought I was too young to get too serious. I purposely dated another Bonnie so I could date who I wanted, hoping they would assume I was not dating too-serious Bonnie but the other Bonnie. It worked for a little while..
I read about 11 lines of computer code that was called "kik" and another program elsewhere also called Kik. The computers didn't distinguish between kik and Kik and trouble resulted. I think the imaginative and observant French-American academic Jacues Barzun may have expressed the possibility that as science discovered all sorts of new things in our world, we might have trouble inventing new words enough to name them all. Maybe we will use subscripts when we write our words2
