March 5 – Discover What Your Name Means Day

Posted on March 5, 2014

All week long, it's Celebrate Your Name Week, with such adorable days as:

(Sunday 3/2) - Namesake Day

(Monday 3/3) - Fun Facts About Names Day 

(Tuesday 3/4) - Unique Names Day

(Wednesday 3/5) - Discover What Your Name Means Day

(Thursday 3/6) - Name Tag Day

(Friday 3/7) - Middle Name Day

(Saturday 3/8) - Descendants Day

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

• Find out how popular your name is using the Social Security Admin. website. I looked at the “Popular Names by Birth Year” tab and found out that my sister, brother and I all were in the top 20 names of our birth years, but that none of my kids were in their years' most-popular lists. 

• Most names don't really connect with their meanings. For example, nobody hears my name (Cathy) and thinks, “pure,” and few people hear the name “Philip” and think “friend of horses.” Right? But when you are writing a fictional story, you can use names to help set a picture in somebody's mind. Author J.K. Rowling is really good at that. You just know, when you hear the name Fleur Delacour, that the character is going to be pretty; whereas Argus Filch just sounds a lot less pleasant. Pet names, too, sound very different, from Scabbers the rat to Hedwig the owl to Nagini the snake! 

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

• The best way to celebrate the day, perhaps, is to invent your own meaning for your name. You can do so with an “acrostic name poem”: Write your name in capital letters, vertically, with each letter positioned at the start of a line. Use that skeleton to write a poem about yourself. Here are two examples:

• J is for joking through days and through nights,

• O is for open to ideas and new sights,

• H is for humane and caring and sweet,

• N is for never, ever, never eating meat!

• Creative, scribbling away into the night.
• Artistic, but in a nicey-nicey kitschy way...
• Tolerant and passionate about fairness...
• Hard-working for my family...
• Yearning to know more about life, the universe, and everything.

Also on this date:

Composer Heitor Villa-Lobos's birthday 

Geographer Gerard Mercator's birthday

Zoologist Sir Charles Thomson's birthday

Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest boards for:

• March holidays 
• March birthdays 
• Historical anniversaries in March

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

• April holidays   
• April birthdays 
• Historical anniversaries in April