Claudia Dávila: Hello, my name is Claudia Dávila. I never used to like it, because the name Claudia actually means "lame" as in "can't walk." Not only that, sometimes people would call me Claud as a nickname, so it just sounded really clumsy. But I like my name now, and besides, in Spanish it's pronounced CLOUD-ya, which sounds much nicer, doesn't it?

I'm from Chile, in South America, so at least my family all call me CLOUD-ya. In English, sometimes people say my last name da-VILL-uh, but I prefer the Spanish way of pronouncing it, DAH-vee-lah. In Spanish, when there's an accent on a letter, it means you emphasize that letter. So because in my name there's an accent on the first A, you say DAH-vee-lah. If there wasn't an accent, you'd say dah-VEE-lah. By the way, my mom was going to name me Francisca, which I would have loved. So now my chosen nickname is Fran, even though my name is Claudia.