Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Hargrove / Politics It Ain't Sotomay-OR in Tennessee
Posted by Brantley Hargrove on Wed, May 27, 2009 at 12:09 PM
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We're loosing our footing on a slippery slope, people. We've got a Supreme Court justice who pronounces her name all foreign-y (non-Anglo). Sotomay-OR. That, if you ask me, sounds un-American. Should be pronounced Sotomayor, like Mayor Karl Dean.
Our scholarly reactionaries over at the National Review say pronouncing a person's name correctly is "unnatural," and that we shouldn't be "giving in" to foreigners and their fancy phonetics. We should be butchering those names, says Mark Krikorian (whose name, I might note, is as American as apple pie), to the point that they're unrecognizable to anyone of similar cultural heritage. It's a time-honored tradition, dating back to Ellis Island.
In this country, we should all aspire to regional ambiguity. Recognizing a cultural heritage is an affront to American-ness, for reasons that shouldn't need explaining, but I'll let Krikorian try. Follow the logic here:
"But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore."
You see, by burdening us with strange pronunciations (non-Anglo), you're shoving your foreign-ness in my face. This country's cultural heritage is not like a tapestry composed of threads of all colors. It's woven with one color, and that's the color of America. That's actually three colors, but you get the point.
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