Name meshing-the trend in question !

In November 2012, according to Dailymail, Britain’s deed poll service got a record breaking 800 requests of couples changing er...Meshing their names after marriage to show ‘unity and equality’ .This trend saw newlyweds combining their surnames so as to avoid dealing with carrying two surnames and deciding the order in which they were to be taken.

Name meshing is a popular and unusual urban trend of weaving two names together to form a single one. Generally it is done by simply fusing the first half of the first name to the latter half of the second name thereby creating an alloy (of names of course :P).

Moving away from our own common life, let us move towards the alleged origin of this trend, the lives of our beloved celebrities, their heavily trespassed lives, the crazed paparazzo applied this technique to address the most famous and heavily covered power couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie thus calling them Brangelina even till now. Closer at home, their Indian counterparts definetly ‘inspired’ by this trend christened Hindi cinema big-wigs Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor ,Saifeena. Other famous couple names include Kimye (Kanye West and Kim Kardashian) ,Robsten (Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart ) ,former pair Bennifer (Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez) etc.

Without any surprise in a profit seeking generation, this weird trend has been tapped by numerous websites offering name mesh generators making it easier for people to whip up their favourite blend .The generator websites include not only couple name generators but also creating domain names for companies .Examples include namemesh.com ,namemesher.com ,how2.name ,namegeneratorfun.com ,couplenames.co.uk among others. The name meshing can be done for babies, couples, companies etc.

But the real peak of this trend lies in the territory of fandom where fans ship various pairings of their favourite fictional characters .Peculiar to this trend is the fact that these christening are most common in long running romantic-drama soaps .Imagine comedy sitcoms where Penny and Leonard (The Big Bang theory) being called Pennard or Ross and Rachel (Friends) being addressed as Roschel  ,weird huh? Now look at romantic drama series where Stefan and Elena (the Vampire Diaries) shipped as Stelena or Damon and Elena being called Delena or Meredith and Derek (Grey’s Anatomy) are being named Merder ...wait that is still weird! Look at this clip of an episode Castle where Rick Castle and Kate Beckett discuss their couple name-

Indian television is not far behind with popular soaps (Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon, Qubool hai etc) with young actors courting each other creating a niche for fans who immediately come up with names to root for their favorite couples.
The gazillion official fan pages and favorite couple dedicated pages with their war inflicting comment interactions among fans shipping different pairs officiate the name they christen their favorite couple with, but why do they do it? Why is name meshing so popular? Is it because we are lazy two call out two different names in our discussions or are we saving time in our frenzied generation or do find some sense of romance in unifying two entities into one or is it the sheer absurdity of it all which caters to the fun element in us?

no copyright infringement intended-i do not own the video , it belongs to a youtube user francina04