it's still Kamala

[calimac]

I was watching Seth Meyers' commentary on the Kamala Harris pick, and noticed that Meyers, who knows how to pronounce her name correctly, didn't remark on the fact that his clips show both Mike Pence and Sean Hannity identically mispronouncing her name. There's no excuse for that at this point; she's been in the news for quite a while and has made clear how to say her name. Checking other commentaries like Trevor Noah I find other Republicans also getting it wrong, though most Fox News hosts get it right or at least stumble over it a different way. The exception being Tucker Carlson, who on being explicitly corrected started ranting about how it doesn't matter and that asking for the correct form amounts to claiming she should be immune from criticism. What?

(I saw some comments saying that Biden got it wrong too. No he didn't.)

I think this is going to become a new Republican mispronunciation meme. The most lasting old one was also on display: despite the closed captioning spelling it correctly, Pence in his remarks twice called Harris "the Democrat candidate." He can't even get the name of the party right, and so can't most other Republicans going back at least as far as Bob Dole.

In other VP pick news, while she's the first ever Democratic national-ticket nominee from California (and indeed, as a friend observes, from west of the Central Time Zone), here's one that says she has one predecessor: Adlai Stevenson in 1952 (they forgot about 1956). I think that's really stretching it. Stevenson was born in L.A. but he had no other connection with the state.

Also pointed out by the ooo-ee-ooh Twilight Zone squad, Kamala Harris was born on the same day that Herbert Hoover died.

Comments

[ex_inklessej388]

Call me crazy but I do not hear a difference between how Meyer's says her name and how Pence said her name in that clip. I Googled the issue of pronouncing her name and it seems to be a lot partisan stuff back and forth. I've worked with a lot of Americans and because of that I've learned to listen past the many accents that they have, perhaps this is an accent thing that is just being blown up because that is the state of political discourse in the United States?

[calimac]

Meyers says KAH-muh-la, which is correct. (Harris herself instructs people to say the word "comma" + "la".) Pence says k'-MALL-uh. It's nothing to do with differing American dialects. It's Republicans looking at the word and guessing how to pronounce it without having bothered to ask or otherwise find out. I pronounced it wrong on first encounter too.

[wild_patience]

You're too kind, dear. I call the mispronunciation a deliberate act of passive aggression.

[voidampersand]

Good to know.