Mayor Pete

Finally. Someone wrote about how to correctly pronounce Mayor Pete's last name: Buttigieg. Boot Edge Edge. The double G's without a D in sight will get you every time.

Thank you Sarah Lyall, a NYT reporter at-large who has thoughtfully provided the pronunciation guide.  Mayor Pete is a descendant from a Maltese family. His father was born in Malta, which is a tiny island country somewhere between Italy and Tunisia that probably can only be found on a map by Jeopardy champions.

Of course, most people will recognize Malta as being one-half of the famous Humphrey Bogart movie 'The Maltese Falcon,' itself based on an equally famous Dashiell Hammett detective mystery story of the same name.

Mayor Pete's name has been as hard to pronounce as it was hard to hang onto the statue of a falcon, "the stuff dreams are made of." And certainly running for president is the stuff dreams are made of, no matter where you come from.

Mayor Pete's supporters have recognized the difficulty in pronouncing his last name. Seen at a rally is a display of the phonetic pronunciation. The photo accompanies Ms. Lyall's lively piece.

Ms. Lyall recounts the stumbles made by many in pronouncing Mayor Pete's last name. 'Mayor Pete' is itself a sobriquet given to the candidate because of the difficulty in pronouncing his last name. I myself have a somewhat difficult to pronounce Greek last name, but nothing as difficult as it is to get Mayor Pete's last name correct.

Ms. Lyall recognizes that President Trump has pretty much come the closest to a correct pronunciation. But President Trump being President Trump, would much rather use 'Mayor Pete' as his way of inflecting derision.

Years and years ago we had another last name prominent in the news with a surname that maybe wasn't that hard to pronounce, but was a dickens to spell correctly. The last name is of course the one most associated with the Long Island Lolita case, when an older man's much younger girlfriend thought she was doing him a favor and tried to kill his wife, an act of course that would allow the two lovers to spend more time together without having to make all those annoying phone calls home, pretending he was working late.

Thus, we were introduced to Joey Buttafuoco, the older man, Amy Fisher, the Lolita in the case, and Mary Joe, Joey's wife who was shot in the face and survived the attempt on her life by Ms. Fisher. There has never been an era when there wasn't something to report.

That Joey's last name didn't prove difficult to pronounce was probably due in part to the familiarity people in the New York area had with buying different kinds of pasta. Spelling the last name was a challenge.

I can imagine reporters who had Post-It notes attached to their computer screens with the correct spelling of the last name. Or, for the tech savvy, keyboard macros programmed to their computers so they could get the last name right.

And Mayor Pete? He's got the last name that is difficult to get your mouth to say correctly, and the brain to choose the right letters to spell it.

A name for the stuff dreams are made of.

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