May 27-29, 2009: Conservative Columnist: Supreme Court Nominee Should Change Pronounciation of Her Name for Better ‘Assimilation’

National Review columnist Mark Krikorian complains that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor (see May 26, 2009) should not insist on her name being pronounced properly—with the emphasis on the last syllable. “Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English,” he writes, “and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to.” Krikorian continues: “This may seem like carping, but it’s not. Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. 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, 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.” [National Review, 5/27/2009] Two days later, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann derides Krikorian’s argument, noting: “I don’t know when your ancestors arrived in this country, Mr. Krikorian, but there was a time in which immigrants with tough-to-pronounce names were encouraged to change them, or sometimes had them changed for them at Ellis Island and elsewhere. Unless Sitting Bull is one of your ancestors, they either got here afterwards, or, like mine, they resisted this racist wall papering pap that you are now spouting. If they hadn’t, today, your name, by your own logic, would be Mark Krik.” [MSNBC, 5/29/2009]