Mayor Pete

The politician of the hour is Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who - unusually for a politician with such a workaday job - is running for President, and making some hay out of it. To my mind, this is the most insightful article I've seen yet on the serious implications of his candidacy.

But never mind that, how do you pronounce his name? Buttigieg has been putting out that it's "BOOT-edge-edge" which doesn't strike me as very helpful. Run together it's a tongue-twister, and at least one of the cascade of mispronunciations collected in this Daily Show segment is by someone who's apparently seen that version and avoided the tongue-twistiness of it by pronouncing it as three separate words. No; that can't be right.

"BOOT-edge-edge" doesn't even parse very well. If that's it, then why is the first "edge" spelled "ig" and the second one spelled "ieg"? That's very puzzling.

But in fact that's not it. Wikipedia offers "BUU-deh-jij", which not only makes a lot more sense in terms of spelling (now the last syllable is spelled "gieg"; OK, that kind of works), and it flows more easily off the tongue, it is - from the same Daily Show segment - much closer to the way Buttigieg pronounces it himself.

Interestingly, to me at any rate, I've actually been to South Bend since Pete took office as Mayor - twice, in fact, once with snow and once without. It struck me as a modestly nice place. Here's what I wrote about it:

South Bend, although a noted university seat, comes up short in the bookstore department. ... Besides Notre Dame, South Bend appears to be notable for two things: it's where Studebaker autos came from, and it makes chocolate. Chocolate being more portable than universities or obsolete cars, of course I brought some home.