Naturalization

In my last blog entry, I referred to Pau Gasol as Paul Gasol. That was totally deliberate.

My friend Mark Krikorian (of the Center for Immigration Studies) and I both believe that foreigners with un-American names should not be allowed to commit their "pronunciation terrorism" upon unsuspecting patriots. Thus, I changed "Pau" to the more acceptable "Paul."

Here are a couple of gems from Krikorian's blog:

"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. [...]"

"[O]ne 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, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there’s a lot more of the latter going on than there should be."

Also, Dikembe Mutombo will hereinafter be referred to as Dick Monroe.