Oh great, Democrats now have two people on their ticket with names that are easy to mispronounce. For the record, our new VP-to-be is Tim WALLZ, not WALTZ or anything like that—though God only knows what Fox News will decide to call him.
In any case, welcome to the show, governor. It's gonna be an exciting three months.
NYTPitchbot noted that the last time a woman ran for President, her VP choice was named "Tim". But, then there is this: https://youtu.be/yTKdHbiLim0?si=53-M6leeYm3b_l0N
It wasn't Tim Kaine's fault that Hillary decided to not campaign more in Wisconsin.
Geez the largest ethnic group in the US is folks whose people came from Germany. Walz isn't hard. Kamala isn't hard. Folks often butcher my family name but it's the whole long e or i thing not the ending.
He doesn’t pronounce it the German way, he calls himself Wallz
Yeah I don't pronounce my family name the German way either hahha. But it's not hard - a ton of Mid-Atlantic folks with similar surnames and common Americanized ways of saying them.
Oh dear lord. My father was the son of German immigrants and I guarantee you can't produce my last name properly. What pathetically weak sauce.
It's not like he's from Milwaukee and named Schroeder, which no one outside of Eastern WI would ever get right.
You forget how stocked the Mid-Alantic is with the OG Germans Americans who ticked off Benjamin Franklin. lotsa of us have names like that and nobody blinks at pronunciation in the American way.
I still miss schroeder books.
The largest ethnic group in the US is actually people whose folks come from the UK.
Albion's Seed
The Walz are closing in on Trump!
Excellent!
Harris and Walz seem pretty easy to pronounce. As are Kamala and Tim.
I do not know what you're talking about. They don't have any weird or even long vowels.
Of course you know what he's talking about. For years many people have tripped up on the emphasis for Kamala's name (KA-ma-la or ka-MA-la). As for Walz, Kevin literally wrote what confuses some people about his name.
Some people aren't confused by these names but it's perfectly reasonable for someone to be unsure until they hear the correct pronunciation.
yeah, i screwed up kamala for a long time, i think just because tv news coverage was inconsistent and i latched on to the wrong pronunciation without even realizing it. then when i did realize, it'd still sometime screw it up because the wrong one was already lodged in my brain.
No, no I don't.
These names are easy. I have a Polish name that people always stumble over. My mom’s maiden name is even more complicated.
Sometimes when people ask me how do I spell my name I use the old joke from Soupy Sales. “My mother helps me.”
With the 3-consonant groupings to form a single sound, some of the Polish (Eastern European names in general) names, as written, could have 6 consonants in a row and end up being very long.
Blame the Finns for stealing all of Poland's vowels.
Love it! I also have a Polish name that, I have been told, is hard for Americans to pronounce. I sometimes joke that I have trouble with Indian or Japanese names because they have too many vowels.
The other joke I like is when the Polish guy goes to the optometrist. The doctor asks him if he can read the fourth line. He replies, that’s easy, that’s my brother-in-law’s name.
The fullback for the SF 49ers has a great Polish name: Juszczyk.
It took me a while but I figured out how to pronounce Polish and Slavic names: The consonants are silent!
Cranking Accept's Balls to the Walz going into work this morning
+1
While Harris picks a running mate, Gorsuch has published what looks like a pro-Republican op-ed in The Atlantic....
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/america-has-too-many-laws-neil-gorsuch/679237/
Here's the thing, everyone would like everything streamlined. But you have this Supreme Court insisting that Congress must write everything directly into the law in excruciating detail instead of setting up principles that regulators need to follow--then he complains that laws are too long. He even used the landmark Civil Rights law as an example of how things used to be--you could write laws that do not run hundreds of pages. No mention of how this court has gutted that legislation.
You can’t argue with people acting in bad faith. I’m not reading anything that asshat Gorsuch puts out, and he can go fuck himself. Everyone loves modernity - it’s why you don’t see many Americans choosing to become Amish or anything - and everyone loves to hate on the complexity that modernity depends on to work well. Even that snide fuck Gorsuch doesn’t want judges making regulations on “what’s the proper design of an aircraft?” or “how much weight can this elevator carry?” So it’s either we put that complexity directly into laws or we allow agencies to issue regulations. He can’t have it both ways and he knows this. He just wants a free pass to destroy shit he doesn’t like. Hope the Second Amendment that he cherishes so much takes him out soon.
You've touched on a thing I was wondering about this morning, after seeing the thing he wrote yesterday.
How is it that a sitting Supreme Court Justice writes a clearly partisan op-ed? I thought they were supposed to be non-partisan in appearance? I mean, we all know who appointed them and all, but their opinions on political matters are not supposed to come up in public, right?
It's just a norm, not a rule or a law.
the atlantic also going maskoff.
but as long as gorsuch will stop woke, conor friedersdork & the rest of the usual gang of idiots are happy to piss all over william lloyd garrison's legacy.
How is it? it's a case of like mother, like son. Neither should have has federal employment.
Gorsuch is pumping a book.
I haven't read the article, but I saw the headline "Gorsuch says we have too many laws" and laughed.
We have too many laws because we have too many assholes and need to contain them, end of story.
I've maintained for a long time that Congress should have a rule that you can't create a new law without removing an old one.
That is not reasonable.
It would make sense if you believe that the current number of laws is the optimal number, forever. This belief is obviously nonsensical.
..,and is it a law if it's a regulation?
Did we need new laws when people started texting while driving? Driving distracted and reading while driving was again the law!
Well, yes, because Gorsuch is an asshole.
I can't read your link.
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Everytime I read one of these entitled imposters feign concern for "everyday Americans" I struggle not to vomit.
Walz seems pretty easy to pronounce. I understand that being a contrarian is your shtick, but come on, at least put some effort into.
'Walz' sounds just like 'Biles'
Tim Walz >> Tim Kaine
Dana Decker >> Dumb & Dumber
I am not surprised by this. It has been said in code, but with respect to Josh Shapiro, to have a biracial woman and a Jew as the ticket, was a way too scary a prospect. The US has become more antisemitic since 2000 when Lieberman was picked as VP, and at least he was paired up to a good old white, male Christian.
I think Walz will kick ass on the stump and hopefully appeal to Midwesterners that are crucial for winning.
Walz has probably already booked a number of trips to neighboring Wisconsin. I feel that WI is the true tipping point state, not PA.
I think the plan is to win all three of PA, MI and WI, and throw in Nevada to keep it from getting too close. Anything else is gravy.
I'm sure that the Harris team has done internal polling on the effect of various choices, and chose accordingly. She knows stuff that we don't. What a contrast Walz will make with Vance!
Shapiro has some real baggage that has nothing to do with religion. It's a good thing that Walz is viewed as very pro labor and has no scandals in his administration, unlike Shapiro. It's also good that his Lt Governor is a Native woman, he's from a rural are, and he served in the US military. He checks a lot of boxes, and does not bring any worrisome baggage.
Yeah. Shapiro was all in on school vouchers, which is a deal breaker for me.
"deal breaker for me"
Ok, if Harris/Shapiro would have been a "deal breaker", your only other choice in November is Trump/Vance
Not the original guy but one assumes “dealbreaker for me” means “he wasn’t my first choice because of that”
Right?
Exactly.
I thought it was pronounced like the dance at first. A few seconds later I adapted. I know some people are either too stupid or too hateful to pronounce a name correctly but I find it hard to believe you think these names are difficult to pronounce. Please stop lowering the bar to the level of stupidity of the worst of us.
Is it pronounced like "walls" or "walts." The latter would be the original Germanic pronunciation while the former is a likely Americanization of the name.
Actually the original German pronunciation would be more like "Vahltz."
Drifting off....I was wondering what kind of bothered me about people who speak more or less unaccented American English and then say their last name using sounds either not in English (like extravagantly rolling the r's) and/or not suggested by the actual letters in their name in English. I realized that when you say your name you are telling other people how to pronounce it. If it's a lot different from how it would be pronounced in English and using sounds not found there you are telling others to say it in a way they won't ever get right even if they try.
My grandparents from Germany had a name with an ö in it (a sound not really in English not to mention no one would know what the umlaut was supposed to do and not typeable in English anyway) and with other letter sounds in it aren't pronounced in English like the would be in German. So they changed the ö to an o and pronounced the name English style.
Anyway I wrote a polite tweet to a woman on NPR ("Rrrroadrrrregahhs" or something like that) discussing that. She immediately blocked me.
Some of us like to hang on to a little of the Old Country. Why should we erase everything from our heritage to conform to someone else's heritage? If I can learn to pronounce an Irish or Italian name, can't others learn mine? Of course it's not easy for everyone but with a good sense of humor we manage. People appreciate it if you try to say their name correctly but bristle at being told "It's too hard to say. I'll say it my way."
Offer not valid for Welsh names with LL in them.
🙂
There is no such thing as unaccented American English. Everybody has an accent; it's just that when you're listening to a person who has the same accent as you, you don't notice it.
There are also good English names that are far from phonetic. The most extreme example I can think of off hand is Featherstonehaugh, pronounced Fanshaw.
Also there's Cholmondeley
This is kind of a pet peeve of mine too, and I don't think I've noticed it anywhere but NPR and MSNBC, that thing where on-air people who are perfectly native-speaker fluent in English will sign off (or introduce selves, sometimes) by saying their name as it would be spoken by a different-language native speaker in a different-language context.
Something about the combination of native-speaker English fluency with sudden other-language fluent pronunciation strikes me as ostentatious, faux-authentic, or otherwise somehow off-key. I'm all for multilingualism, but this is different. People will usually pronounce their own names in other-language registers if they have other-language accents, and there's nothing ostentatious or unexpected about that. But the dual language fluency makes the switch sound jarring. Imagine seeing "Peter Thiel" and hearing him say he's "Paytehr Teele." It would take a while to connect the one to the other (and it wouldn't change any minds about him being an asshat).
I have to think this is an editorial decision at both outlets and I'd like to know the reasoning they give. At NPR maybe it was Sylvia Poggioli who started it, because I seem to remember somebody gushing about the mysterious allure of the way she said her name.
PS NPR doesn't want to talk about anything having to do with mic behavior or vocal standards. I've tried engaging them on all the gasping and airway noise they've been coaching for and haven't even gotten crickets, even though it's against their own written guidelines.
Our voices are maybe half the equipment we happen to have and half how we use it. It's not 1935 and we don't expect to hear only a particular formal stentorian sort of speech and only spoken by a male person on the radio.
But there are certainly people on WNYC/NPR with voices that are grating to me and/or sound like they need a sinus procedure or some work with a speech teacher or other sort of expert. This is the how you use it (or a fixable medical problem) part of how our voices sound. I would think that a person whose job is *speaking on the radio* would pay some attention to their *speaking.* And that would be part of their qualifications for the job. I don't get it.
I know what you mean about some of the voices, both enunciation and "musicality," and some can be hard to listen to. Believe it or not they do (or did, before the recent slashing) have at least one highly-credentialed vocal coach who they say works intensively with on-air talent.
I don't personally have a problem with different regional or subcultural accents-- they can be interesting-- but NPR does two things that get me *really* peeved (the name thing is just minor).
One, as earlier mentioned, is the way they're inhaling audibly (and often very loudly) on-mic and they seem to be trained that way now, despite every tradition and written instruction in the radio business that breath and mouth noises are no-nos that are annoying to listeners. I think this started at the BBC and they copied it to seem high-status or something, but wherever it comes from, I really hate it and can't listen to some of their anchors because of it.
The other is that very many of them drop their voices at key moments to the point where I can't hear that crucial point they've built up to. In the bad old days people were trained to maintain a fairly consistent volume because of technical limitations of radio. Now that FM has given them a huge clean dynamic range they're using it to replicate beautifully and precisely the one major feature of normal in-person conversation that's most calculated to drive people with hearing problems batty, namely those drop-offs. Far too casual and normal-conversation-like for the medium and for a significant proportion of their listeners, I think.
/end rant
At least they post transcripts.
I don't remember people complaining because they didn't know whether to pronounce Clinton with a glottal stop or true t.
Since I know a modest amount of German, I was pronouncing it “vahlts”.
Regardless of that, Walz waltzed right into the VP candidacy with his Republicans are weird comments.
::blink:: Harris is hard to pronounce?
But can Walz do the Potomac Two Step? …
I was thinking about this whole obsession conservatives have with pronouncing her name ka-MAL-a, like there is something really weird about putting the accent on the first syllable of a woman's name. May I present:
* Katherine
* Jennifer
* Stephanie
* Pamela
There are probably a lot more I haven't thought of yet.
*Karen
Sanders recommended Walz - that's good enough for me.
Joe Manchin also enthusiastically supports Walz for VP. Agreement by Sanders and Manchin, WTF!
Oh is Joe a Democrat again? Which day of the week is it?
i just want his stage walk-on music to be "From the windows to the Walz".
Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show has nothing on the hype of the intoduction for Walz. Geesh
I'll prefer Cronkite's style, they can have Rivera
I Take Back My My Hesitancy on Walz
....I am at this moment watching his first national speech...He is Damned Good, Damned on Point, a great campaigner. Best Wishes, Traveller
They looked pretty good at the Pennsylvania rally. Tim Walz is about as folksy Americans as it gets. Kamala made a great choice.
sigh......
I was hoping for Kelly but........both have some similarities
Both are from border states
Tim has had to deal with those pesky Canadians - c'mon Tim where's the wall that Canada was gonna pay for?
Like VPs of the past are you gonna be a nattering nabob of negativism
Perhaps you can see Winnipeg from your back yard? (you betcha)
I hope he does not have the quirks of Dan Quayle
I hope to be more and more impressed as time goes by
Probably it was the last-minute revelations of a misclassified homicide that barred Shapiro. Not his stances on Gaza or charter schools; those were known, studied and didn't stop him from becoming one of the last two standing candidates. But 22 stab wounds including to the back of the neck classified as suicide, when he had links to the suspect, is too gory to not lead to endless talk and too clearly wrong to defend. And there simply was no time to study where it might lead and how bad it might get. I think that's probably what clinched it for no-scandal Walz.
Is this fan fiction? This reads like Vance and the couch. Too crazy not to be true
Ok you’ve got me fooled enough that I will Google it
I too had to google this and apparently if you can get past the blatant smears of everything and everyone connected to Harris and Shapiro on the local Fox affiliate's website, the PA top-level court has agreed to take a case that matches this description. Maybe a kind of iffy connection to Shapiro, but the suit is real.
As a PA resident I'm actually relieved he didn't get the nod, because I think he can do a whole lot more for the D slate as governor. In such a crucial state there's going to be no end of MAGA rat-fuckery and after being AG for years he's best-placed to counter it and make sure the election is as clean as it can be, and in ways he just couldn't if he was barnstorming the country the whole time. His lt gov is comparatively wet behind the ears (and from Pittsburgh so doesn't know the eastern region as well) and the AG doesn't have the horsepower to do it herself.
I also think his vibe and affect don't match quite as well with Harris as Walz does. He'd have been good, but Walz is a little better, and keeping things clean in PA is more important. He's a good bet for a cabinet slot if he wants one, and then it'll be time for Casey to retire and he can go for that seat.
+1