A small cultural note that's been tickling my fancy recently:
The couple times various German friends have happened to pick up and leaf through my American passport (aside from making fun of it for looking different from theirs...) they've looked at the first page and uttered pretty much precisely the same sentence: "Ach, du heißt auch" (Oh, you're also named) and then my middle name.
Germans don't usually have middle names (though some do) so they think it's nothing short of hilarious when they discover I have another name beyond the one they already knew. And since German lacks a word for the concept, when newspapers want to talk about how some American conservatives are frothing at the mouth over Barack Hussein Obama's middle name, they resort to calling it his "zweiter Vorname" - literally, his "second first name."
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