Reading the blogs (and the links provided) today, I smirked at the little stupid things that pass as "serious thinking" and "real critiques" these days:
- Mark Krikorian over at National Review gripes about how Sonia Sotomayor (So-toe-my-YORE) pronounces her name; he thinks she and the rest of us should conform to the English pronunciation, putting the emphasis on the first syllable. An article in The New York Times relates Sotomayor's own pride in her name:
John W. Fried, Sotomayor's first supervisor in the Manhattan prosecutor's office, said she gently corrected him when he mispronounced her name so that it sounded more anglicized.
Well, hell. I grew up with this story in my own rather conservative family: When my father was in the Army in the early 1950s, he insisted that people pronounce the family name the French way, with a silent final "t" (Dugat= "Du-gah"--or with a Texas accent, "Doo-Gaahw"). If someone said "DU-gaT," my father refused to answer, even at roll call. All those Cajuns from south Louisiana (Thibodeaux, Boudreaux, Arceneaux, Benoit, and such) would let the Army butcher their names, but not my dad, descended from Cajuns who moved into Southeast Texas in the early 1800s. This story was a favorite in the family. We still pronounce our surname the Acadian way. I just don't get this far-right obsession with Anglicizing everyone's name. - An increasing number of conservatives raise the possibility of Sonia Sotomayor being unduly influenced by her gender and ethnicity. Would they say that about a white, Anglo male? Matthew Yglesias notes with great irony the minority members of the Senate Judiciary Committee--white males, every one. No gender or racial bias there, of course.
1 comment:
Still feeling curmudgeony, are we? :-)
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