Favorite poster from NR's "The Corner"

holy shit; way to infantilize sociopathic murderers there

to be fair (ha) it was never that widespread

Krikorian:

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.

Never surrender!

Must be real quiet over in the anti-immigration think tanks these days.

frankly I'm surprised no one's accused her of being an illegal immigrant herself

surely Bachmann or Coulter could "rise" to the task

She eats chili con carne with her left hand. It's enough.

Anyway. from a cursory glance at a couple of opinions she really does look like an expert in boring technical stuff -- the sort of justice who in the 1890's would have specialized in maritime law. In other words, she looks like she scrupulously adheres to precedents.

(but this belongs in the other thread; they do overlap)

from a cursory glance at a couple of opinions she really does look like an expert in boring technical stuff

isn't this, like, every appellate judge ever?

"Anyway. from a cursory glance at a couple of opinions she really does look like an expert in boring technical stuff -- the sort of justice who in the 1890's would have specialized in maritime law. In other words, she looks like she scrupulously adheres to precedents."

Souter 2.0.

oh man can we have a thread for maritime law????

Why not?

insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn't be giving in to.

my jaw actually dropped

c'mon, everyone knows Spanish is unnatural, I mean the Bible was written in English (by King James) so it's clearly God's language, get with the program

xpost srsly - ending that sentence on a preposition is just taunting

and of course if you know even a tiny bit of spanish -- and i only know a tiny bit, like the names of baseball players -- then the spanish pronunciation comes totally naturally. i had to stop and think what he meant by the "natural" english pronunciation, and even then i guessed wrong -- i thought maybe he meant the MAY should be emphasized, but he's arguing for SO.

what a weirdo.

^^ real talk

if she had any decency she'd just legally change to a properly Anglicized respectable republican cloth name that's pronounced as it's spelt like e.g. Fluella Cholmondely-Worcester

Or 'Bertie Wooster' to make it easier for pundits...

Give Montana Girls a Chance [John Derbyshire]

A reader vents:

Derb — I've been hoping that someone might be bold enough to rain on the Sotomayor "compelling life story" parade.

The woman grew up in the capital of the world, went to two Ivy League schools, and was blessed by Providence with the precisely correct right race-gender two-fer for the moment.

This is a story of privilege, dammit, not adversity.

Show me a Montana girl of un-useful ethnicity who put herself through law school waiting tables, after being left with two young children when her Army husband was killed overseas, and I'll start oohing and aahing over her compelling story.

Of course, such a person would never ever end up on any President's short-list, no matter if she graduated first in her class at her non-Ivy institution, no matter how extreme the intelligence and dedication and hard work she displayed over the subsequent course of her career. That's simply how the world — and especially the legal world — is constructed today.

It's so much easier to take a properly-credentialed member of the East Coast elite and hold her up as a shining example of American meritocracy instead, because she is conveniently hued and delayed her entry to the world of the well-heeled until the age of 18 or so. Easy, and misleading. Feugh!

Like my reader, and I'm sure a lot of other Americans, I get mighty annoyed by the unspoken implication in a lot of commentary that anyone not a member of a Protected Minority must have grown up in a twelve-bedroom lakeside mansion and been chauffered off to prep school with a silver spoon in his mouth. Judge Sotomayor was raised in public housing? So was I. Her mother was a nurse working late shifts? So was mine. When did white working poor people disappear off the face of the earth? Where are the eager listeners to their "compelling stories"?

Was it really not possible to correct past injustices without creating an entire — and apparently permanent — class convinced that accidents of geography or biology have gifted them with special insight, wisdom, and "empathy"?

As my reader very eloquently expressed it: Feugh!

(Which, since somebody always asks, is pronounced to rhyme with "Peugh!")

"un-useful ethnicity"

Laying claim, btw.

Feugh!

Feugh!

(it rhymes with "Puegh!")

the precisely correct right race-gender two-fer for the moment.

really, when you consider all the obvious advantages they hold, it says something questionable about the character of hispanic women that they are not running everything these days.

http://img.thesun.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00561/flyer_280_561813a.jpg

Was it really not possible to correct past injustices without creating an entire — and apparently permanent — class convinced that accidents of geography or biology have gifted them with special insight, wisdom, and "empathy"?

I am generally against affirmative action but this is some of the stupidest shit I have ever read.

wait this may be stupider, post Virginia Tech massacre:

Spirit of Self-Defense [John Derbyshire]

As NRO's designated chickenhawk, let me be the one to ask: Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn't anyone rush the guy? It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness' sake—one of them reportedly a .22.

At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren't very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can't hit squat. I doubt this guy was any better than I am. And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren't bad.

Yes, yes, I know it's easy to say these things: but didn't the heroes of Flight 93 teach us anything? As the cliche goes—and like most cliches. It's true—none of us knows what he'd do in a dire situation like that. I hope, however, that if I thought I was going to die anyway, I'd at least take a run at the guy.

monday morning shoot-out surviving

Yeah see I think I'd just RUN AWAY from the guy with the gun but that's why I'm a pansy liberal and not a real man like John Derbyshite.

But Can She Pronounce "Sotomayor"? [John Derbyshire]
In a sensational breakthrough, a young lady of Indian ancestry (dot, not feather) has reached the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

According to the spelling bee Web site, Ramya is fascinated by linguistics and is eager to learn new languages. She is fluent in Tamil, a language spoken in India, Sri Lanka and Singapore, and informally teaches Tamil to the children in her neighborhood.
I bet lines form round the block to sign up for those lessons! And given that Tamils are liable to have names like Kantharatnam Shanthikumar, Kandiah Thirugnansampandapillai Francis, and Subbayya Sivasankaranarayana Pillai (who has a family of prime numbers named after him), a facility with spelling must come in handy.

05/28 05:49 PM

I don't understand this at all. Also, I watched the Spelling Bee today. Half the kids are of Indian descent.

this may have already been said here somewhere, but how do these people pronounce scalia? SKAY-lee-uh?

"BAD-ass"

"WUN-ov-us."

a young lady of Indian ancestry (dot, not feather)

its not about hating minorities, its about taking pride in your race

heritage not hate

fuck em, they can spell

Haterage Foundation

I'm getting the feeling that Derby is crying for some attention.

no, derb was just the first to bring it up.

[John Hood]

I, too, have long found it tedious to see politicians and commentators preen in front of cameras and microphones to flip their rs and flatten their as. It's a prissy pretense, a way to curry favor with certain aggrieved groups but never a consistent rule of pronunciation. For example, during the presidential campaign, Obama made sure to say Pahk-ee-stahn at every opportunity, but I never heard him say Ahf-ghahn-ee-stahn. He never said Frahns, or Deutschland, or Rus, or even Keh-bec. It would sound silly.

Anglicizing foreign names while speaking in English isn't just a practical necessity and a sign of good manners (yes, that's right). As others have said, it's a habit that helps to bind together people of diverse backgrounds. I'm not just talking about the recent past. Let's just be clear here: If the new rule is that it is disrespectful to pronounce proper names in any way other than how the natives say it, then I'm putting all Yankees, Midwesterners, and pedants on notice that I will be outraged if my first name is not henceforth pronounced with both syllables.

Scah-lee-ah

Again, something that Nabisco mentioned quite awhile ago; these guys are slowly twigging to the fact that there's a lot more people out there in power and of significance who ain't necessarily Anglo or of an easily recognizable Anglo/western/whatever background. Like, all these new folks are just slightly different enough that these guys can't identify them as The Same. It's like they're finally having to deal with different race/cultures/naming conventions/accents/whatever, where they've either never had to consider such things before(white privilege, etc.)

It's like my dad not bothering or even attempting to correctly pronounce anything on the menu of the Mexican restaurant in Knoxville run by friends that he & my mom have patronized for 5 years(mom having been a former Spanish teacher doesn't quite have this problem). Even after his eldest son(the loudmouth who will get drunk and rant on the internet about doctor who or whatever) and the waiter he's friends with is there offering tips with increasing sarcasm on how to correctly pronounce, "ranchera." No go.

And these guys are scared shitless. Anything that forces them to do anything other than whatever idiotic or unthinking stance they've fallen into is not just being polite; it's an attack. So now white rich male protestants are the persecuted minority, and they know feel the license and that hit from the crackpipe of moral certainty to complain as such.

Oh no, white male hegemony coming to an end; we gotta secure the borders and actively piss off anyone who ain't us or else the brown people will come and move into our neighborhoods and sodomize our daughters and produce mud children etc etc etc.

Oh yeah, and

I, too, have long found it tedious to see politicians and commentators preen in front of cameras and microphones to flip their rs and flatten their as. It's a prissy pretense, a way to curry favor with certain aggrieved groups but never a consistent rule of pronunciation.

In Living Color beat this guy to the punch with a sketch about newsreaders doing this 18 years ago.

Poison [Jay Nordlinger]

About Judge Sotomayor and racial poisonousness, one could publish many letters. Let me share with you just one — maddening and heartbreaking at the same time:

Dear sir,

You say in Impromptus, “The news is drenched with Sotomayor now, and also drenched with the word ‘Hispanic’: She’s Hispanic, you know. She would be the first to tell you (though maybe she would say ‘Latina’).”

I have been reflecting on the “empathy” standard enunciated by President Obama, Judge Sotomayor’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano (the firefighter case), and her remark that “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

I am Australian (a “white male”). My wife is from Ecuador, which I guess makes her a “Latina” and possibly “Hispanic,” though she never refers to herself by either word. She does look South American — her skin is a coffee colour. It would also be fair to say that my wife grew up in extremely modest circumstances.

We have a three-year-old son. He is white — no mistaking it. He will grow up to be a “white male.”

I wondered how Judge Sotomayor would treat my son if he were one of those firefighters. Would she regard him as a white male? Would she regard him as part Hispanic because his mother is Ecuadorian? Would she arrive at a different result depending on the knowledge she had — about his paternity or maternity?

The real question is, Why is any of this “identity” stuff even relevant? More important, what is this obsession with the colour of skin? It occurs to me that, if my wife and I have another child, that child could have the same skin colour as my wife. If that happens, should that child get more favourable treatment than my “white male” child?

As you and Thomas Sowell and others say: This is poison, sheer poison.

Yes. Sick.

P.S. Maybe Judge Sotomayor would call for blood analysis.

oh for fuck's sake

Clash! [Jay Nordlinger]

In yesterday’s column, I had an item on a story involving that most beauteous of things: a clash of liberal pieties. I have collected such stories for years. In this particular case, the Governor General of Canada ate the heart of a seal. (Not sure whether it was a baby seal.) Bad, bad, bad.

But she is a “woman of color.” And she was honoring an “Inuit” tradition. Good, good, good; good, good, good.

What’s a liberal to do?

A reader from Arizona wrote me to share a similar story, and dilemma: There is a Hopi ritual of smothering baby eagles. Hopis and Hopi rituals are good — very good. Smothering baby eagles — not so cool.

Clash!

Haha Dan what is your username from??

I thought Nordliger was an eighteen-year-old College Republican when I first read him last year.