What's up with the widespread mispronunciation of Kamala Harris's name?
The origin is simple enough. In English it's most common for the stress to be put on the second-to-last syllable of a word. This means a two-syllable word most often has the stress on its first syllable. A three-syllable word most often has it on the second syllable. So by default you'd pronounce Harris's first name as:
Kuh-MALL-uh
But this is far from a universal rule, and Kamala isn't an English name anyway. It has the stress on its first syllable:
KOM-muh-lah
It's a perfectly ordinary mistake for an English speaker to say this wrong. The real question is why so many conservatives who do know how it's pronounced are aggressively continuing to say it wrong. What's the point?
There isn't one, really, except to show that, by God, they aren't going to take orders from some liberal woman. Plus there's the usual Trumpism of refusing to ever admit a mistake, no matter how slight or obvious. And their deep habit—practically subconscious at this point—of disrespecting women and people of color. As a result, we have crowds of MAGA fans chanting kuh-MALL-uh as if they're showing her who's boss. It's kind of pathetic.
This is the same people who brought you the Democrat Party. What do you expect? Everyone in that party has the emotional maturity of a third grader.
There's a large component of working from a rule, of, people hate it when their name is mispronounced, so they'll just bear down on that.
But there's an additional factor of Barack HUSSEIN Obama othering: The vice president's first name sounds much like familiar Western name "Pamela.," Well, that's no good-- they need something less Western so she can be tarred as a foreigner.