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Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from how Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: Lauren vogelbaumb Here few things perplexed expectant parents more than

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Speaker 1: picking just the right name for their child. And the

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Speaker 1: middle name is no exception. It must have both gravitas

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Speaker 1: and joyed to view and set the tone for a

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Speaker 1: lifetime of repetition on official forms. But what's in a

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Speaker 1: middle name anyway? In ancient Rome, people often had five names.

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Speaker 1: The first three were like today's modern surname, middle name,

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Speaker 1: and last name. The last two names usually revealed the

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Speaker 1: person's place or clan of origin. The modern tradition of

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Speaker 1: inserting a middle name or two into a child's moniker

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Speaker 1: most likely began in the Middle Ages, when parents gave

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Speaker 1: babies a personalized first name and a saints name for

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Speaker 1: middle name, followed by a surname. By the mid eighteen hundreds,

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Speaker 1: this European habit had entered the United States, brought along

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Speaker 1: by immigrants, and began to take on new significance. Middle

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Speaker 1: names inspired by saints were sometimes replaced by religious middle names,

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Speaker 1: such as a maternal maiden name. By the time the

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Speaker 1: Civil War began in eighteen sixty one, middle names were

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Speaker 1: given purely at the parents discretion. Any name of their

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Speaker 1: liking was fair game, and were often aspirational in nature,

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Speaker 1: with two or three middle names given. After all, a

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Speaker 1: hypothetical name of Peter Aurelius Oliver Smith carries a little

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Speaker 1: bit more weight than plain old Pete Smith, doesn't it.

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Speaker 1: The idea of a middle name took hold in the

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Speaker 1: United States, and by the start of World War Two

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Speaker 1: in nineteen fourteen, official enlistment forms became the first government

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Speaker 1: documents to request applicants middle names. Middle names were so

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Speaker 1: much the norm that when computers became routinely used for

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Speaker 1: US citizenship documents, they were programmed to recognize three names,

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Speaker 1: not two or four, only three. If a middle name

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Speaker 1: wasn't entered, the program would automatically insert an m I,

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Speaker 1: which was a military abbreviation for no middle initial. But

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Speaker 1: for those without a middle name, let alone an initial

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Speaker 1: outside of official forms, invention can be the key to success.

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Speaker 1: For Joanne Kathleen Rawling better known as j. K. Rowling,

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Speaker 1: author of the Harry Potter series, the middle name Kathleen

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Speaker 1: is a fictional effect, appearing as if by magic. Today's

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Speaker 1: episode was written by Laurie L. Dove and produced by

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Speaker 1: Tristan McNeil. For more on this and lots of other

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Speaker 1: historical topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot

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Speaker 1: com