Costanza, Can't Stand Ya

It being graduation season, the Sun-Times has churned up a nice little human-interest piece about how graduation name readers must inevitably pronounce some very difficult last names. High school graduation name readers may have the luxury of practicing pronunciation beforehand, but we just attended our sister’s college graduation ceremony featuring thousands of students. The university seemed to have a pretty air-tight system though: student hands card to announcer with name spelled out phonetically, announcer reads out name, student marches across stage, clappaclappaclappa.

The article mentions how multisyllabic and multivowelled last names are often the most problematic pronounciation-wise, which brings to mind a funny quote from Middlesex, a novel by former Chicagoan Jeffrey Eugenides; “Generally speaking, Americans like their presidents to have no more than two vowels. Truman. Johnson. Nixon. Clinton. If they have more than two vowels (Reagan), they can have no more than two syllables. Even better is one syllable and one vowel: Bush. Had to do that twice.”

Image via The New No. 2