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Not a name I'd ever use, but fascinating. In English, I would use Laura in a heartbeat (but it was impossible with Beatrice and no Italian connection!), so I never gave Lauren serious thought. Compared to Laura, it seems drab and uninteresting. My French friend Michele was teaching French in England at one point, and she arranged penfriends for her classes: they wrote in French, the French kids replied in English so it was a win-win situation. One day she heard one of the girls in her class bragging to her friends that she had a French boy penpal, which Michele knew was impossible; she'd deliberately chosen a girls-only school in Lyon. It turned out that the girl penpal's name was Laurence, which the English child knew as a male name; she'd never heard of Laurent.