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.”
A suicide note purported to be written by the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein while he was in jail in 2019 uses language that in some cases echoes his past writings to friends and family.
One phrase found in the apparent suicide note — “No Fun” — also appears on a handwritten page found in Mr. Epstein’s jail cell at the time of his death, as well as in emails he sent over the years.
And another saying in the suicide note — “watcha want me to do — bust out cryin!!” — appears in emails that Mr. Epstein had written to people close to him.
A cellmate claimed that Mr. Epstein left the suicide note before he was found unresponsive in their cell weeks before his death. The New York Times reported on the note last week and successfully asked a federal judge to unseal it.
If authentic, the note gives a view into Mr. Epstein’s mind-set before he was found dead at age 66 in August 2019. The New York City medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.
‘NO FUN’
A different handwritten note was found in Mr. Epstein’s cell when he died, and investigators believed it was written by him. In that document, Mr. Epstein complained about jail conditions — burned food, giant bugs and being kept in a locked shower. He concluded it with the underlined phrase, “NO FUN!!”
Mr. Epstein also used the phrase in emails when describing things he was unhappy about, or situations that had not gone his way.
‘watcha want me to do — bust out cryin’
Mr. Epstein used the phrase “watcha want me to do — bust out cryin” with friends, and in messages to his brother, Mark Epstein.
Like the note released by the judge, Mr. Epstein’s emails were often short, with staccato phrases and erratic punctuation. The emails were contained in millions of pages of documents the Justice Department released in response to a law passed last year requiring disclosure of records pertaining to Mr. Epstein.
It has become an article of faith in the New York State Capitol that when Gov. Kathy Hochul enters the Red Room on the building’s second floor to announce a budget agreement, the deal is actually far from sealed.
This year was no different.
Despite declaring that “today is the day” to announce an agreement on a $268 billion state budget, Ms. Hochul on Thursday acknowledged that several key initiatives — including a new tax surcharge on multimillion-dollar second homes in New York City — had been agreed on in principle, but that the details still needed work.
Even the top-line figure had not been finalized.
Lawmakers are fond of saying that the devil is in the details. But in the absence of the lengthy budget bills that include those details, which have yet to be printed and voted on, a host of unanswered questions remain.
Here are five of them:
Why did Hochul announce a deal when one hadn’t really been made yet?
New York’s opaque budget process, which starts in January with the State of the State address and is supposed to be completed by April 1, has become far more than a negotiation over a fiscal document.
Governors have tended to use the budget to wedge in legislative priorities, wielding their leverage over billions of dollars to get their way.
Ms. Hochul has embraced this practice. And, in a re-election year, she wanted to convey to voters that she intended to stand up to President Trump’s immigration crackdown, help out New York City and lower costs for everyday New Yorkers.
She made that case on Thursday at a news conference flanked by several of her top aides. Notably missing were the leaders of the State Assembly and Senate.
When will the budget actually be passed?
Not this week. The Assembly speaker, Carl E. Heastie, said on Thursday that it was “very premature” of the governor to say a deal had been reached. He would not even say that the Legislature had agreed to the $268 billion figure.
He complained about Ms. Hochul’s penchant for jamming nonfiscal policies into the budget and said he would not discuss such matters with his members until he had a better sense of the total amount the state would be spending.
As he spoke, members of the Senate and Assembly, who are currently not being paid, were wrapping up their legislative business for the week in a rush to return to their districts. They will be back in Albany on Monday; it is unclear what bill language, if any, will have been printed and distributed by then.
Did Zohran Mamdani get what he wanted?
Mr. Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, campaigned on wresting more than $10 billion in tax increases from the state to pay for his ambitious agenda. That will not happen this year.
Ms. Hochul did accede to a new tax on second homes that targets the city’s richest property owners whose primary residences are outside New York City. The goal is to raise $500 million each year, which will go toward closing the city’s estimated $5.4 billion budget deficit.
But she spurned the mayor’s request to make changes to a tax credit called the Pass Through Entity Tax that is used by some business owners. Mr. Mamdani had said that the measure, which was also backed by the City Council speaker, Julie Menin, could raise up to $1 billion a year in tax revenue.
Aside from tax increases, Mr. Mamdani’s overarching priority has been expanding child care in the city. Ms. Hochul’s budget does just that, with $4.5 billion allotted for child care and prekindergarten programs across the state.
It’s not the whole loaf, or even half. But Mr. Mamdani can point to that funding and say that he is advancing toward his goal of providing free child care for every New York City child under 5. And while the governor rejected his efforts to fund a program to make buses free, she directed more than $1 billion in additional aid to the city that, combined with revenue from the second-home tax and other proposed measures like delays in pension payments, could help Mr. Mamdani work to close its budget gap.
How will the tax on pieds-à-terre work?
State lawmakers — and just about everyone else — are scratching their heads about the details of this tax surcharge, which Ms. Hochul proposed with great fanfare last month. The New York Times previously reported that one proposal being discussed would apply one tax rate to pieds-à-terre with values between $5 million and $15 million; a higher rate for ones valued between $15 million and $25 million; and an even higher rate for properties valued at $25 million or more, according to three people familiar with the matter.
How much the property owners would pay is still up in the air. Ms. Hochul said on Thursday that more details would be coming in the near future and that the tax would apply to units worth $5 million or more.
Also being sorted out is how, exactly, the value of each co-op or apartment would be determined.
“It’s going to take some time to get to the right number to assess that,” the governor said, noting the city’s complex system for calculating a property’s assessed value.
“We’re looking at the difference between what is currently assessed but what is market value,” she added. “We’re working it out with the city. We have had some really good conversations.”
How will pensions change for state workers?
Facing pressure from the state’s largest public unions, Ms. Hochul has been trying to determine how to restore certain pension benefits that had been cut for public employees hired after 2012.
Any changes could end up costing the state hundreds of millions of dollars, while also saddling local municipalities and school districts with increased spending burdens. Several of the labor groups have prioritized lowering the minimum retirement age to 55 from 63.
Ms. Hochul said on Thursday that the particulars were still being negotiated, but stressed that the cost to the state and local governments would be less than the $1.5 billion that has been requested by the unions.
“We are willing to look at this and make changes, but a much more scaled-back monetary proposal,” she said.
“We will release these numbers as soon as it’s absolutely done,” she added.
Cornell University’s trustees announced on Thursday that they would investigate an April 30 incident in which the president, Michael Kotlikoff, bumped into students with his car after a debate over the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
A small group of students confronted Dr. Kotlikoff after he had spoken at the university event about free speech and the Middle East conflict. They posed questions about the suspension of pro-Palestinian student demonstrators in previous years, walking with him to his vehicle, a black Cadillac SUV.
After the students surrounded his vehicle, Dr. Kotlikoff got in, reversed and bumped one student. Another student said that his foot was run over. Emergency medical technicians arrived and checked the foot of that student, who was not seriously injured.
In an email to the campus on Thursday, the university said that an “ad hoc special committee” had been established to oversee the investigation of the events of that night. It said that Dr. Kotlikoff had recused himself from the investigation and “any related university decisions connected to the matter.”
The statement said that the trustees are “committed to ensuring a fair and thorough review guided by adherence to university policies and the best interests of the Cornell community.”
The event highlighted the lingering tensions on college campuses over the Israel-Hamas war, even as the large-scale protests from the spring of 2024 have dissipated.
Some student groups at Cornell have said that the university had unfairly disciplined pro-Palestinian students involved in the demonstrations.
One of the disciplined students was Momodou Taal, a Ph.D. student in Africana studies and a leader of the movement to establish protest encampments on the Ithaca, N.Y., campus. The Trump administration had sought to deport him and students at other universities whom it accused of spreading antisemitism.
Last week’s event, billed as a debate between supporters of the Palestinian cause and Israel, also featured Norman Finkelstein, a political scientist and author who spoke about Israel’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on Israel.
The day after last week’s incident, Dr. Kotlikoff framed himself as the victim, asserting that students had harassed him and banged on his car. The students denied doing that, and video of the incident that the students supplied did not show them hitting the vehicle.
-
Milwaukee, WI1 minute agoMilwaukee Weather: Mild and breezy Saturday, slight chance of showers
-
Atlanta, GA7 minutes agoAtlanta reacts after major 285 shutdown postponed
-
Minneapolis, MN13 minutes agoSan Antonio visits Minnesota with 2-1 series lead – WTOP News
-
Indianapolis, IN19 minutes agoMilder Saturday, cooler Sunday, then quiet before midweek rain | May 9, 2026
-
Pittsburg, PA25 minutes agoMcCorkle: Pittsburgh Steelers 2026 53-Man Roster Prediction (Pre-OTAs)
-
Augusta, GA31 minutes agoGeorgia governor candidate Olu Brown campaigns in Augusta
-
Washington, D.C37 minutes agoWeekend weather in the DC Area: A little bit of everything
-
Cleveland, OH43 minutes agoBomb threats against Northeast Ohio school districts continue for 2nd day