A woman about my age walked up the steps and sat down with a group on the other side of the aisle. I noticed the back of her T-shirt when she turned to sit. It had a logo of a palm tree and a bagpiper. Above the logo was a name: Dunedin. Under the logo, it read: Highland Games and Festival. I remember wondering how to pronounce Dunedin and whether the name was Scottish because I had just been to Scotland.
I soon forgot about it when my daughters sat down with me. I never mentioned it to anyone, and I didn’t see the woman again.
Later that day, I saw a Facebook post with a picture of a town and a steep road. The caption above the picture read:
World’s steepest street Dunedin, New Zealand who’s been here?
There was that name I couldn’t pronounce again. That made me curious because it seemed like a huge coincidence to see it twice in a day.
Like I often do when I’m curious about something, I opened DuckDuckGo and typed in Dunedin, and the New Zealand town appeared in the results. Then I added Highland Games and Festival to the search, and a town in Florida popped up that matched the logo on the woman’s shirt. Nothing from Scotland.
I specifically asked for Dunedin in Scotland, but nothing showed up.
Then, I asked for the pronunciation since I’d never heard or
read the name before and got this:
/duh-NEE-dn/.
Finally, I searched for the name's origin and found it is the old Gaelic name of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the search engine gave me this: Dunedin means "Edinburgh" in Scottish Gaelic, deriving from "Dùn Èideann," which reflects the city's Scottish heritage. Dùn is the Gaelic word for fort or castle, and Èideann is a centuries-old name for the area where Edinburgh is located.
The last coincidental detail in this sequence is that I had just come home from visiting Edinburgh two months earlier and didn't know Dunedin is an old name for Edinburgh!
Has anything like this ever happened to you? What would you call this coincidental experience? Does it have a name? ChatGPT calls it an illusion, but I’m not so sure.
