New York
Why Can’t People Pronounce ‘Zohran Mamdani’?
It was more than an hour into last week’s critical three-way debate for mayor of New York City, and somehow, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had yet to say the name of the race’s front-runner.
He called him “the assemblyman” and a miniature version of former Mayor Bill de Blasio. But he shied away from saying a name that he had repeatedly butchered on the campaign trail.
“Mr. Mandani”
Andrew Cuomo in a campaign video.
And on the debate stage.
Andrew Cuomo during a Democratic primary debate in June.
“Mr. Mandami”
His pronunciation was so notably off that, during a Democratic primary debate in June, the assemblyman himself, Zohran Mamdani, called him out on it.
Zohran Mamdani during the same debate.
“M–A–M–D–A–N–I”
Mr. Cuomo is not alone.
For various reasons, legitimate and perhaps otherwise, Mr. Mamdani’s first and last name have become the subject of rather adventurous, even creative, displays of linguistic fumbling.
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, struggled with his name at the first debate of the general election last week, calling him “Zor-han.”
Curtis Sliwa in the first general election debate.
“Zorhan Mandami”
Letitia James, the New York state attorney general and a key political ally, botched his name at a major campaign rally in Washington Heights this month, enthusiastically shouting “Mandami” as he came onstage.
Letitia James at a Mamdani campaign rally.
“Zohran Mandami”
For Mr. Mamdani, having his name botched is not new. He said in an interview that mispronunciations were common growing up as an immigrant in Manhattan.
“It happened quite a lot,” he said. “But frankly, I don’t begrudge anyone who tries and gets it wrong. The effort means everything to me.”
Asked about any mnemonic tricks he recommends to help people pronounce it, Mr. Mamdani laughed.
“It’s pretty phonetic honestly,” he said.
“Zohran Mamdani”
Zohran Mamdani at a debate during the primary.
Mr. Mamdani, who is running to become the city’s first Muslim mayor, said that some people like Mr. Cuomo were intentionally mispronouncing his name or refusing to make an effort to say it correctly.
“Those who go out of their way to mispronounce it — that’s not a mistake, that’s a message,” he said.
His supporters have embraced the issue as a rallying cry against Mr. Cuomo, turning the audio clip of Mr. Mamdani correcting him into a viral song online. Mr. Mamdani also said that his mother has started to sign emails with “Momdani” — a nod to her pride in being his mother that might also help with the pronunciation.
Mr. de Blasio, the former mayor, is another Mamdani ally who admitted that he had stumbled over his name.
“Zorhan Mamdani”
“I think I’m in the ballpark now, but it did take me a while,” Mr. de Blasio said, adding: “I think it’s just to the American English ear, the construct is a little counterintuitive. It takes some practice to get the cadence of it right.”
Mr. Sliwa said in an interview that he was trying to do better: “It’ll take time. It’s not intentional.”
Mr. Sliwa, whose last name is pronounced SLEE-WUH, said he understood Mr. Mamdani’s pain.
“Out of 46 years that I’ve been the guy who founded the Guardian Angels, I’d say about 33 years of that time, my name was constantly mispronounced,” he said. “I don’t take offense to it.”
President Trump’s failed efforts to say Mr. Mamdani’s name might be viewed less benevolently, since the president has repeatedly attacked the candidate and threatened to arrest him.
President Donald J. Trump speaking to reporters on Air Force One this week.
“Mandami”
His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, used an even more outlandish pronunciation, merging parts of his first and last name.
Karoline Leavitt at a press briefing in July.
“Zamdami”
While some pronunciation mistakes might be deliberate, several linguistics experts told The New York Times that both Mr. Mamdani’s first and last name feature letter arrangements and vowel sounds that are not common in English, and it was not a surprise that some people struggled with them.
“Languages differ from one another as to what sequences of sounds are frequent, or even possible to pronounce, and they also differ as to what spellings or letters are associated with what pronunciations,” said Gillian Gallagher, a professor of linguistics at New York University.
There are hundreds more words in English with the sequence “nd” than with “md,” Ms. Gallagher said, adding that these clusters of consonants can lead to speech processes that result in mistakes. One, known as assimilation, involves morphing the second “M” in Mr. Mamdani’s last name into an “N,” making it sound like “Mandani.”
Another, known as substitution, leads speakers to replace the “N” in Mamdani with another “M.”
Whoopi Goldberg, the television host, on “The View.”
“Zohran Mamdami”
Those patterns of speech can be difficult to avoid.
“Mamdani has an ‘M’ next to a ‘D’, and that’s hard for English speakers,” said Professor Laurel MacKenzie, a co-director of the NYU Sociolinguistics Lab.
“Our tongues are just not used to making that specific sequence of sounds.”
The softer “Ahn” sound in both Mr. Mamdani’s first and last name can also be challenging. Frequently, “Zohran” has been pronounced with a screeching “Zohr-ANNE.” That miscue is the result of vowels being pronounced differently in Americanized English, said Suzanne van der Feest, an associate research professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.
Carl Heastie, speaker of the New York State Assembly, at an event where he endorsed Mr. Mamdani.
“Zohr–ANNE”
“That is somebody who speaks mainly English and is just making it into American English vowels,” Ms. van der Feest said.
“It’s an example of how spelling is interfering with how someone’s name is pronounced.”
John Samuelsen, the international president of the Transport Workers Union, said his pronunciation of Mr. Mamdani’s first name feels like a “very common outer-borough way of pronouncing Zohran.” He also noted that he avoids saying Mr. Mamdani’s last name, because “I’m afraid I’m going to mess it up.”
John Samuelsen at a Mamdani campaign rally.
“Zohr–ANNE”
Mr. Mamdani said he once visited a mosque in Manhattan for Friday prayers during the campaign and asked the group to raise their hand if they had ever heard someone consistently mispronounce their name. Most people in the room raised their hands.
“It’s something countless immigrants have experienced,” he said. “When people mock or intentionally distort someone’s name, it’s a way of saying someone doesn’t belong here.”
Mr. Mamdani said he took pride in his name. His mother picked his first name, which means “the first star in the sky.” His father picked his middle name, Kwame, to honor Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, who fought for independence.
“Andrew Cuomo never struggles with names like John Catsimatidis,” Mr. Mamdani said in reference to the Greek billionaire grocer. “But somehow Mamdani is too difficult. It’s an issue of prejudice.”
Others have expressed frustration over Mr. Cuomo’s errors, including the journalist Anand Giridharadas, who corrected Mr. Cuomo on MSNBC this week: “This is a very big, diverse city you want to lead. We should get the names right.”
Mr. Cuomo sometimes gets it right.
Andrew Cuomo in a video posted to his campaign’s TikTok account.
“Zohran Mamdani”
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said that the former governor’s name was often botched, too. Indeed, Como, like the Italian lake, is a common mispronunciation for Cuomo, which is pronounced KWO-MO.
“It’s unintentional and he should get over it — people mangle ‘Cuomo’ all the time and you don’t hear us whine about it,” Mr. Azzopardi said.
Ms. MacKenzie and others were quick to note, though, that pronouncing difficult names correctly is not an insurmountable challenge. Practice and a concerted effort to ask people how they pronounce their names helps. That’s particularly the case in New York City, with such a rich array of immigrant communities from across the world.
“We all learned how to say ‘Daenerys Targaryen’ when we were all into ‘Game of Thrones,’” Ms. MacKenzie said.
“We can learn hard names. We can do it. We can figure out how the spellings map to the sounds. We can all get there. We just have to practice.”
By Stefanos Chen, Maria Cramer, Christopher Maag, Wm. Ferguson, Sutton Raphael and Laura Salaberry
June 16, 2026
How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
Perhaps Ruby Pucillo’s number one bragging right is that she’s a tenth-generation New Yorker, one whose ancestors have lived thriftily in the boroughs since they first immigrated to New York City more than 300 years ago.
Ms. Pucillo, 25, has tried to carve out a life for herself that would mirror her family’s ideals of spending little and living a lot. But because the city her relatives arrived in generations ago now ranks among the most expensive in the world, that can present a challenge.
Ms. Pucillo’s 9 to 5 is working as an assistant editor at Abrams, an art book publishing house. After a recent promotion, her salary was bumped up to about $48,500 before taxes. Her work day begins on the subway, where she gets a head start on reading proposals and manuscripts as she travels to her office in the Financial District from uptown.
On many a weeknight, and sometimes on Saturdays, Ms. Pucillo performs as an improv jazz musician. She studied music and loves to play, but the amount she makes fluctuates — sometimes netting her upward of $1,000 in a month, other times $25, often something in the middle.
On Sundays, Ms. Pucillo travels back to where she grew-up, Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., to teach French and give voice lessons for $350 a month.
All told, she makes about $55,000 a year, with wiggle room for her jazz gigs.
Rent is High, but Community is Free
Ms. Pucillo lives in a rent-stabilized prewar apartment with two roommates in West Harlem. Rent runs her about $1,460 a month, including utilities and internet.
“I spend more than half my income on my rent,” Ms. Pucillo said. “But I really like my apartment, and I live on the most beautiful block in Manhattan. Community is completely free.”
After rent is paid, Ms. Pucillo diligently tracks the leftovers of her paychecks on a spreadsheet on her computer; she can account for almost every cent. Each month, she spends $300 or less on groceries and $140 of her gross monthly income goes toward public transit, using a pretax subsidy her job offers.
Then Ms. Pucillo has a “cushion” tier of expenses, for unforeseen circumstances like a co-pay at the doctor’s office, a late-night taxi ride or a case of beer for a friend who might have done her a favor, like helping her move. “I know I’m not going to pay for these things every month,” she said, “but it’s nice to have a monthly increment that either goes into my savings or comes back out of my savings later.”
Ms. Pucillo’s monthly splurge is on entertainment — dining out, live music and shows, admission fees. “I budget $500 a month for that,” she said, which she conceded felt like a lot. “But it can disappear quickly in this city.”
And twice a year, she treats herself to a curly cut done by a friend on Long Island, for the budget total of $73 — not including, of course, a tip and the cost of a Long Island Rail Road ticket.
Ms. Pucillo doesn’t pay for many streaming services, but every few weeks she pays $3 to watch a movie on YouTube. She also pays $12.99 a month for Apple News and $10.99 for Apple Music. The remaining money goes into her savings.
An Eye for Deals
Many in Ms. Pucillo’s orbit “are in a difficult financial spot, too,” she said. “Many of them are creative and have a similar idea of what it means to achieve financial stability and what it means to make your dollar stretch.”
Ms. Pucillo’s ideal equation involves doubling or tripling up on activities to get the most bang for her buck, especially when it involves something free or a promotion that makes it very cheap.
When the fitness app ClassPass offered a discounted rate of $5 per month, she signed up so she could attend cheap workout and dance classes with friends. When she found a $1-a-month deal for a cooking app, she took it so she could share meals with friends without restaurant prices.
“I’m very opportunistic,” she said. “When things come up, I take them, but otherwise I figure out how to do just about everything for free.”
Recently, Ms. Pucillo had the shopping bug, but lacked the funds to act on it, so she and a group of friends arranged a clothing swap. Everyone emerged with new pieces for their wardrobe, she said, without spending a dime.
Ms. Pucillo credits her upbringing for making resourcefulness feel second nature.
“I come from a base line that says, ‘Don’t buy anything,’” she said. Her parents moved the family to Westchester when she was young and started renting in Hastings-on-Hudson because, she said, “they wanted to put us through really good public schools. They said, ‘If you can’t be rich, live where rich people live.’”
Ms. Pucillo is grateful for that. “I had to find ways to make money,” she said, which propelled her toward “what probably will be a different and better financial situation than my parents had, and than their parents had.” Her parents have since moved from Westchester to the Bronx.
She noted that because of an array of part-time jobs she worked during her undergraduate years, a hefty scholarship and a family tradition of supporting one’s children through college, she graduated debt-free, unlike many people she knows.
Saving Up for a Piece of the City
Even with a tendency toward frugality, she said, it’s still hard to navigate New York City as a 20-something, where the incomes of friends vary, and there are so many things that entice, especially when your friends want to drop money and you don’t.
“This is a very expensive place to socialize,” Ms. Pucillo said. But she’d never consider moving.
“The people in New York — I understand them, and they understand me,” she said. “There’s a directness that you really don’t find anywhere else.”
Ms. Pucillo’s dream is to own an apartment in the city — “a pretty lofty goal in this place,” she said. Despite the nine generations of New Yorkers that came before her, Ms. Pucillo’s family doesn’t own any property.
This is why Ms. Pucillo is dedicated to building up her savings however she can, and she is preparing to open her first line of credit after years of holding out.
Ms. Pucillo’s father, a guitar teacher and a Staten Island native, has always been fond of asking this question: If you had the choice between staying in New York for the rest of your life and never being allowed to leave, or being able to go anywhere else in the world, but never returning to New York — which would you choose?
She doesn’t have to deliberate for a second. “Absolutely, I would stay in New York for the rest of my life, and I would never leave.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
new video loaded: Fans Celebrate Knicks’ First N.B.A. Title in 53 Years
transcript
transcript
Fans Celebrate Knicks’ First N.B.A. Title in 53 Years
New York City erupted in celebration after the Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs in Game 5 of the N.B.A. finals to win their first championship since 1973.
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[cheering] “We did it. We hung in there, and we brought it home, baby. New York!” “This is insane. Like, I don’t know what — I don’t know how else to describe it.”
By Julie Yoon
June 14, 2026
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