In Defense of "Natural Pronunciation"

Kerry Howley | May 27, 2009

As Damon Root explains here, libertarians probably won't have much to gain from a Sotomayor SCOTUS appointment. But at least we can be glad that her nomination prompted Mark Krikorian to write this transcendent defense of speaking American:

Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English... and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn't be giving in to.

Hear hear! And it's a crying shame we all capitulated to the Italians in calling Alito Aleeto. Henceforth I encourage all of you to order whores-de-vores if you'd like to eat something prior to an entree main meal. Anything less would be downright disrespectful to the English language, which as we all know rose fully formed from the magical tongues of Anglo-Saxon royalty, wholly unpoisoned by Latinate or Norman influence. (And let's please hand it to conservatives for consistently denying evolution in any form.) As Nick Gillespie once put it:

Thank you, Middle Eastern 9/11 hijackers, for finally getting the point through our thick skulls (forgive our slowness, but all too many of us are descended from immigrants) that the greatest security threat to the United States is the influx of Spanish speakers from across the border with Mexico.

Christ, it's bad enough that we have to eat foreign food, live in states with Spanish-derived names, and answer that extra question about which language to use at the ATM. (Thought experiment: How much is that extra second or two of time slowing down the U.S. economy and driving down our productivity, precisely at the moment when the Chinese are breathing down our necks like a bunch of post-industrial railroad coolies? You can be damn sure that the Chinese government doesn't allow ATM users to pick their own language.)

So true. So think of it as a national security issue: SOtuhmayer. To pronounce it any other way is to defy nature in all her prescriptive glory.