Have you ever heard of the term “timeline twins?”
Simply put, it’s a way of describing the relationship between certain events. I had great difficulty explaining it to the students in my legacy letter writing class last week so I’ll take a stab at it in today’s post.
I first became aware of the term through an article by Jason Kottke. Since I haven’t been able to find earlier references to it, it’s quite likely the term originated with Jason.
Jason uses music and movies to illustrate the concept. Using music as an example, listening to Phil Collins’ “Two Hearts” (1989) today would be equivalent to listening to Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crimson and Clover” (1969) in 1989.
Although I didn’t use the term, I often used this concept to compare events in my life to events in my parents’ lives. As I listened to music by The Beatles, I recognized that my parents were listening to Glenn Miller at that same corresponding point in their lives. It’s a bit humbling to realize that we were less than two decades removed from World War II at that time in the early 1960s, or about the same distance we are today from the first Gulf war.
As interesting as I found Jason’s post, I found the 66 comments to be equally fascinating. Evidently many people use the concept of timeline twins to put their own lives and family history some perspective. What about you?
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand -- Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died -- is available at Amazon.
Flickr photo courtesy of oskay.
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