A thousand curses on Kevin Drum for making me read some idiocy from the National Review’s attempts to find things wrong with Sonia Sotomayor:
Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English (which is why the president stopped doing it after the first time at his press conference), unlike my correspondent’s simple preference for a monophthong over a diphthong, and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to.
As someone whose last name is “unnaturally” pronounced with the emphasis on the final syllable (we say “OrZELL,” not “ORzel”), let me offer a hearty “go fuck yourself” to Mark Krikorian. And some more curses to Kevin Drum for causing me to read this nonsense in the first place. Now I need to go scrub my eyeballs to get the stupid off.