March 5 – Discover What Your Name Means Day

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• Youncan find out what your name means using websites such as Behind the Name and Baby Names.  

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• Findnout how popular your name is using the Social Security Admin. website. I looked at the “Popular Names by Birth Year”ntab and found out that my sister, brother and I all were in the topn20 names of our birth years, but that none of my kids were in their years’ most-popular lists. 

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• Mostnnames don’t really connect with their meanings. Fornexample, nobody hears my name (Cathy) and thinks, “pure,” and fewnpeople hear the name “Philip” and think “friend of horses.”nRight? But when you are writing a fictional story, you can use namesnto help set a picture in somebody’s mind. Author J.K. Rowlingnis really good at that. You just know, when you hear the name FleurnDelacour, that the character is going to be pretty; whereas ArgusnFilch just sounds a lot less pleasant. Pet names, too, sound veryndifferent, from Scabbers the rat to Hedwig the owl to Nagini thensnake! 

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• Findnout if your name has been used in a song title here. 

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• Thenbest way to celebrate the day, perhaps, is to invent your own meaningnfor your name. You can do so with an “acrostic name poem”: Write your namenin capital letters, vertically, with each letter positioned at thenstart of a line. Use that skeleton to write a poem about yourself.nHere are two examples:

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• Jnis for joking through days and through nights,

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• Onis for open to ideas and new sights,

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• Hnis for humane and caring and sweet,

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• Nnis for never, ever, never eating meat!

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• Creative, scribbling away into the night.

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• Artistic,nbut in a nicey-nicey kitschy way…

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• Tolerant and passionate about fairness…

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• Hard-working for my family…

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• Yearningnto know more about life, the universe, and everything.

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Composer Heitor Villa-Lobos’s birthday 

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• nn Marchn holidays 

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• nn Marchn birthdays 

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• n n Historicaln anniversaries in March

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• nApriln holidays   

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• nApriln birthdays 

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• nHistoricaln anniversaries in April

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