New words

Peculiar phenomenon: Seeing someone who reminds you of someone you know. Looks mostly the same but not exactly. One thing could be off: age or weight, say. It's like an older version of your friend, or a portly one. Or maybe in a different ethnicity.

I've tried looking up a word for this, but the closest I get is lookalike which seems to fall a little short. It's not as specific as I want. Or as dramatic.

I thought there might be a foreign equivalent, but the closest I get is doppelganger, a German word. (I've recently become a fan of German words that have no English equivalents: heimweh, schadenfreude, that kind of thing.) The definition's "a ghostly double" and it's got a sinister connotation. The Norwegians have a similar word, vardoger. Same thing but without the sinister connotation. It's just someone who looks like you and does what you're going to do before you do it.

But how about this: olderganger? The meaning's clear, right? Or how about ethnoganger? You see where I'm going with this. Nothing too earth-shattering. Just one of those random Saturday afternoon thoughts.

Courtesy Wikipedia, you can take this concept one step further. What if it actually is the person you know, just in a different place? Or rather, two different places at the same time? Apparently it's a phenomenon known as bilocation. Saints do it.