What’s in a Name?

“Hi, my name is Zane.”

Whenever I finish saying these words, my newest acquaintance—whoever it is—doesn’t then ask my hometown, concentration, or House. Instead, an eyebrow raises and she asks a different question. It can range from a curious inquiry to a challenge, but I always know what it will be: “What’s your real name?”

Now, Zane may not be the most common name in existence—according to babynamewizard.com, it has never been in the top 1,000 names for girls—but it doesn’t sound like a celebrity construct, like Apple Martin or Prince Michael II, a.k.a. Blanket. In Arabic, Zane means “beloved.” In Hebrew, it’s “gift from God.” The English language seems to think it’s a variant on “John.” And everyone’s heard of the writer Zane Grey and the actor Billy Zane, right?

The assumption that “Zane” is a made-up nickname for myself is false. Check my birth certificate. But if you read my e-mail signature, you’ll notice that “Zane” is preceded by a mysterious letter “H.” Naturally, the next question is: “What is your first name?”

My full name, in its unabridged form, is Henrietta Zane Bratton Wruble. It’s long. It sounds pretentious, at times. It stretches across the entire length of my HUID. To speak it out loud is clumsy enough that I have taken to whipping out said ID so that inquisitors can see the absurdity for themselves. Ever since coming to Harvard, its entirety has been plastered on every class list and official e-mail, so I’ve long since given up on maintaining it as my Deepest Darkest Secret.

To the government, DMV, and Harvard, this is how my name will always be. To Amex, Bank of America, and now The Crimson, I am H. Zane B. Wruble. To my distant relatives in Ireland, I imagine I am still Henrietta. To my friends I will always be Zane. I have even tried on a couple of other names for size before. At French camp when I was 16, I was “Zazie.” Zazie was the outgoing goofball I never had the courage to be in high school. In China, I was Wu Hanrui: traveler, socialite, and obsessive photographer.

Nevertheless, my opponent is determined to continue the interrogation, transforming her tone into an accusation worthy of “Law and Order.”

“Why don’t you like Henrietta?”

Truth is, the choice was never actually mine.

During my mom’s entire pregnancy, my parents knew I was a girl, but they kept this strictly on the down low to avoid incessant interference from my relatives on choosing a name. They ended up using the gender-neutral “Zane” to refer to me to avoid giving the secret away, and it stuck for the duration. “Zane” was also a family name, belonging to a female relative from a disputed number of generations before.

There was just one obstacle in the path to making it official: my mom, in all of her hormonal and high-risk pregnancy bliss, mandated that I be named after her-much-beloved-Aunt-but-not-actually-an-aunt Henrietta, whom I never had the opportunity to meet to verify that claim. My father would have preferred to keep the extant name for simplicity and, well, pragmatic reasons. My parents decided to compromise and use both names, but call me by my middle name. (For the record, “Bratton” is my mom’s last name.)

Of course, I am certainly not the only person who has foregone his or her first name for a middle one. I’ve always wondered what N. Gregory Mankiw’s story is. In eighth grade, one classmate confessed in an English essay that he, too, was harboring a secret first name that he chose not to use. Even Zane Grey dropped his real first name—Pearl—in favor of his middle name.

However, using “Zane” has come back to bite me. Up until recently, my driver’s license said only “Henrietta Z. Wruble,” so using it as identification to fly created a mismatch with my plane tickets. Most airport employees realized that the unusual letter plus my utterly harmless appearance meant that I wasn’t worth harassing, but freshman year one ticket counter attendant decided to chew me out for it. After a short argument and her insistence that “the Z could stand for Zachary,” I pulled out a secondary ID to confirm my story and was sent on my way (the TSA ID-checker at security signed off on my boarding pass without a word).

Then there was my high school graduation. After I received my diploma, the Head of School pulled me over for a hug. As he did so, he delivered the ultimate blow to my emotional solar plexus, revealing he knew nothing whatsoever about me: “You’re a special person, Henrietta.”

And of course, there’s gender confusion. While Zane may never crack the top 1,000 baby names for girls, it was number 235 for boys in 2008. Naturally, my frequent e-mail communication with non-acquaintances has led to numerous misunderstandings and the incorrect assumption that my cells are sporting a Y chromosome. Last spring, frustrated, I wrote to “Dear Abby” asking if there was a polite way to correct this mistake, but I ended up foregoing her advice to sign all my e-mails with “Ms.” to avoid coming off as pompous.

I’ve gotten better over the years at accepting the inherent confusions that my name brings. I just smile in silence when the Greenhouse Café card swiper chirps, “Have a nice day, Henrietta!” Or when someone I meet up with for the first time in Lamont exclaims with shock, “I wasn’t expecting you to be a girl!” I can laugh it off and say, truthfully, that it happens all the time.

A friend actually suggested to me once that I forego my name entirely. “Just pick a symbol,” he said. “Like Prince. You could be ‘The Harvard Student Formerly Known as Zane.’”

Maybe someday I’ll try that out.

—H. Zane B. Wruble ’11 is an Organismic and Evolutionary Biology concentrator in Quincy House.  She plans on naming her first child $@$$i.