What was Shakespeare thinking?

By Anastasia Harbuck

Published: June 27, 2008

When I was stopped by the law several weeks ago, I thought it was bad enough that the officer pulled me over for driving too slowly - in a school zone no less - and asked, if he brought the dogs around, would they find any drugs hidden in the vehicle?
Oh, they would have found drugs all right - just not the illegal kind. I always keep a plastic baggie of Bayer aspirin and cough drops in my car. But I felt bad enough without the officer asking me to pronounce my name more than once.
“Anastasia …” he said, his eyes flickering warily between me and my driver’s license. “Isn’t that Russian or something?” he added, asking me the same question I’ve been asked for almost 24 years.
“Greek,” I replied, offering him the same answer I’ve been giving people for almost as long.
As a rule, I despise clichés. But I’ll go ahead and get this one out of the way. Poet and playwright William Shakespeare once said, “What’s in a name?”
Yeah, keep talking, Willie. You weren’t the only girl in your fourth grade class not named Ashley, Jennifer, Jessica or Amanda. In 1994, even an utterly mundane name like Mary or Jane would have stuck out in a classroom full of chicly-named mid-80s babies. A four-syllable name of exotic and foreign flavor didn’t just make its 10-year-old owner an anomaly - it made her a target.
“Anesthesia”, “Euthanasia” - you name the pun, I’ve heard it, been there, done that. One schoolmate, who found herself particularly funny, even called me “Cinderella.” She said I should have taken it as a compliment. “Anastasia” was actually one of Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters.
I wasn’t amused.
Then there’s the wide-eyed stares and questions of, “Are you from Eastern Europe? What happened to your accent?”
The closest I’ve ever gotten to Eastern Europe is watching episodes of “Rocky and Bullwinkle” and listening to “Back in the USSR” by The Beatles. As for an accent, I do have one - a Southern accent that screams I was raised on my mama’s excellent biscuits and tomato gravy, fiery Pentecostal preaching and triple-digit Alabama summers.
Take a look at my family and the mystery of my name just gets bigger. There’s mom Doris, dad Charles and brothers Charles II and John. Normal. Safe. All-American. I always wondered what possessed my parents to call me by such an unusual name when the rest of their children had such common ones.
The only explanation I ever got out of Mama was that one day she and Daddy were browsing a baby book, saw the name and it struck their fancy. Bam. Just like that. My fate was sealed. Then of course, there’s my last name, which doesn’t really help. I have a “name theory” in which if a kid has a strange first name or last name, her other name will be a bit more normal-sounding so the two names will balance out. Take my big brothers - Charles Lewis Harbuck and John Harbuck. When a stranger meets them, if he’s blown away by their blatantly German last names, their normal first names at least help cushion the fall.
Naturally, and tragically, their little sister debunks the name theory. When a stranger hears “Anastasia Harbuck,” there’s nothing for him to hold onto. Some people are so traumatized when I introduce myself, they take to calling me Anne or Anna - which, as a little girl, was all right by me.
Not so with my mom. Mama never believed in nicknames and she worked hard when we were little not to call us by any or let anybody else get away with it. I’ll never forget how disappointed she was when some of my brother’s college buddies came home one day calling him “Chuck.”
Mama told me to be proud of my name. After all, not everyone had a name like mine.
“Don’t put yourself down,” she’d always tell me. “Remember you’re the over-comer.”
Good advice. But when you’re 10, carrying around a name like Anastasia Harbuck makes you feel a bit like Frodo with his ring.
I was a bit older when I came to truly appreciate my name. Coming to terms with my name issues came in the unusual form of my college art history textbook. My art history professor told his students that, pound for pound, this book was going to be the most education we would get at Troy (then Troy State) University. Lugging that 50-pound thing around campus, I believed him.
One evening, browsing through art of the Byzantine Empire, I came across the picture of a gorgeous Byzantine mosaic called “Anastasis” or “Ascension.” I had never known my name to mean anything except a Russian princess that may or may not have been murdered by Bolshevists and lent her name to an irritating animated musical and a verse in a Rolling Stones’ song. Anyway, this sparked a quest to find not only meaning in my own name, but in everyone else’s as well.
According to the Social Security Administration’s Web site, the top nine names for girls born in 1984 (like me) are: Jennifer, Jessica, Ashley, Amanda, Sarah, Stephanie, Nicole, Melissa and Heather.
Well, that explained a lot. I wondered about the meanings of these slick 1980s baby names, so I went to Parenthood.com where I researched the top nine girl names of my birth year.
Jennifer is derived from Welsh meaning “white spirit” or “white wave.” Jessica is actually a made-up name by that pesky playwright Shakespeare for his work “The Merchant of Venice.” In Shakespeare’s fictional world the name means “God sees” in Hebrew. Ashley is Old English for “ash tree field”, Amanda means ”worthy of love” in Latin, Sarah is Hebrew for “princess”, Stephanie means “crown” in Greek, Nicole is the feminine version of Nicholas which means “people’s victory” (It’s also derived from the Greek goddess of victory, Nike), Melissa is Greek for “bee” and Heather is a “flowering shrub”.
Oh yeah, and I’m the one with the weird name.
As I researched the origins of my own name further, I learned about the “Harrowing of Hell.” It’s a story from the earliest days of Christianity which tells of the two days Jesus Christ was buried. Obviously, he wasn’t napping during that time in the tomb. According to the story, he went down into hell and rescued all of the righteous people who had died before his coming.
When he rose up out of hell with all the righteous people, the story calls his ascension the “anastasis.” Anastasia can also mean “resurrection” or “perseverance.”
I thought back to what my mom would tell me when I felt blue: “You’re the over-comer.”
My name’s meaning made me think of my favorite mythical beast, the phoenix, which I thought was way cooler than being named for some insect, tree or flowering plant.
Maybe Mama really did know what she was doing.
Since that time, I’ve come to treasure my name. I wear it proudly. More than that, I want to live up to it.
I recall a scene from “Black Beauty” in which Beauty’s mother tells him, “I hope you will grow up gentle and good and never learn bad ways; do your work with a good will, lift your feet up well when you walk and never bite or kick even in play.”
She’s telling her son to live up to his name. I hope someday to live up to mine.
I love my strange name and I’m glad to see trends have turned in favor of kids with “unusual” names. Now it’s nothing out of the ordinary to meet a school kid named “River”, “Adrianna”, “Barron” or “Skye”. Top girl baby names for 2007 included names like Isabella, Ava, Madison and Sophia - far cries from the packs of Ashleys and Jessicas from my own grammar school days.
I’ll turn 24 this August and, though I appreciate my name, living more than two decades with it has made me cautious when I consider naming my own children. And, though babies are not in the works for me right now, when I think about baby names, I tend to lean more toward simpler ones - for a boy maybe “Sam” or “Ben” and for a girl maybe “Mary” after my grandmother.
Whatever the case, I’m sure my kids come whining to me someday about having “boring names” when their mom got a “cool one.” And I’ll echo Mama in saying, “Don’t put yourself down. You’re the over-comer.”
Which reminds me of the card Mama gave me on my graduation day. Inside the card she wrote, “We know you can overcome any obstacles set before you … you already have.”
Yep, that’s me, true to my name.