Two weeks into his Presidential campaign, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has been exposed as a flip-flopper. For years, it turns out, he has been toggling between pronouncing his name “Duh-Santis” and “Dee-Santis.” When Fox News tried to get to the bottom of things, the Governor only complicated matters. “Listen, the way to pronounce my last name?” he said. “Winner.”
In politics, names can be just as important as slogans. Was America ever going to elect a Dukakis? Perhaps DeSantis is worried that “duh” implies slowness, or a taunt. But “dee” pulls his mouth into a sort of smile, which is not among his best expressions. It also whispers of wokeness: defund, decarbonize, decolonize. (Though there’s also decertify the election.) According to the Tampa Bay Times, he was always Ron Dee-Santis until his wife, Casey, decided that she liked it the other way. He’s been in limbo ever since. “It’s syllabolic,” Donald Trump, who sometimes calls the Governor “Rob,” said recently. “Wants a syllabolic name.”
One benefit of the DeSantis confusion was that it primed lawmakers for another nomenclatural switcheroo. Last Tuesday, the New York State Senate voted to re-add “Tappan Zee” to what’s officially the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge. Over the years, there have been other proposed names for the river crossing, including the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Bridge (that’s ROSE-uh-velt, not RUSE-uh-velt), but, colloquially, it’s always been just “the Tappan Zee”—until the junior Governor Cuomo, Andrew, sneaked the “Mario” renaming into a bill in 2017. “People feel as though something of their own was stripped away from them in a deeply unfair manner,” James Skoufis, the new bill’s sponsor, said a few minutes after Wednesday’s vote. Skoufis (SKOO-fiss) said that this re-renaming was nothing like DeSantis’s waffling—“He’s got to figure out how to pronounce his own name”—but then he dropped a Tappan Zee bombshell. “The Native American pronunciation is ‘tuh-PAN,’ ” he said.
Who could keep up? Even professional pronouncers are reeling. “NPR does not have a position on the bridge that crosses the river as part of the Thruway,” Tony Cavin, the outlet’s managing editor for standards and practices, said the other day. As for DeSantis, Cavin said, most broadcasters have used Duh-Santis. But NPR is a Dee-Santis outfit. “We had some people who reached out to his office a few months ago, and were told it was Dee-Santis,” Cavin explained. “It’s uncharted territory,” he went on. “We wish he would just tell us what it was.”
This called for an expert. “There are maybe thirteen thousand DeSanti in the United States,” Mark DeSantis, a one-time Republican candidate for mayor of Pittsburgh, said. “It’s always been Duh-Santis.” But rogue Dee-Santises abound. Joe DeSantis, a basketball coach and commentator, generally goes by Duh-Santis. But, he acknowledged, “the more formal it is, the more I’m gonna say Dee-Santis.” He added, “At my stage in life, I don’t really care. It’s not a big deal. But, lemme tell you, there’s a third way. Are you ready? Da-Sannis. I will never say that.” He then mentioned a heretofore unknown variant: “Once in my life, I gave my name on the phone as Joe Duh-Santis. They said, ‘Joda Santis?’ ” Could it be that the Governor just doesn’t want to be called Rhonda?
Prefixes, plosives, portmanteaus: these are times of sylabollic confusion. One day, Facebook; next day, Meta. Football teams, M. & A.s, pronouns. DeSantis may be a flawed messenger for the virtues of self-identification, but you take the allies where you can get them. Even our cultural bedrocks are in flux. The past few years have brought clarifications from Adele (“uh-DALE”), Brendan Fraser (like “razor”), and Ariana Grande (rhymes with “candy”). Ralph Fiennes, van Gogh, Steve Buscemi, Rihanna. Lindsay Lohan was briefly “LOW-in”; she’s now back to “LOW-han.” Denzel Washington is sometimes “DEN-zil.” Nobody says “Nabokov” with any conviction. The writer actually accepted multiple pronunciations, but never NA-bah-kov, which was used by Sting in “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.” (“A despicable gutterism,” the writer once said, of that variation. Incidentally, he went on, the first name is Vladimir, “rhyming with ‘redeemer.’ ”)
“Naming is so important,” Simon Dixon explained recently. He would know: he’s a co-founder of Dixonbaxi, the branding firm that oversaw the shortening of “HBO Max” to “Max.” Dixon said, “If you have naming that is torturous, or overlapped, or is a confluence of several brands, what happens is you confuse the content.” He liked “Max” because it’s simple and flexible, and it combines different portfolios without perplexing people too much. “ ‘Max’: it’s an energetic word,” he said. “It’s very short. It’s easy to say in most languages.” There was something about the cks sound, as in “Netflix,” that conjured a ticking film reel: “Sometimes there’s a subjective magic.”
David Zaslav, the C.E.O. of Warner Bros. Discovery, viewed the “Max” rebrand in objectively rapturous terms. “For our company, this is our rendezvous with destiny!” he pronounced. Experienced Zaslav watchers may have noticed that he was engaging in a meta form of branding, a tagline within a tagline. “Rendezvous with destiny!” was the exact phrase he used, last month, to rally embattled employees at CNN (a Duh-Santis network), and, a few years back, to warn the world about a shark-overfishing crisis.
Dixon, for his part, advised against change for change’s sake. For instance, people call the bridge “the Tappan Zee.” Why fight it? “And, if it’s said in a New York accent, it sounds cool,” he said. Did he have any advice for DeSantis? Dixon thought he should drop the “winner” shtick. As for the name, he said, “Dee-Santis is more definitive, it sounds more like a leader. Duh-Santis doesn’t. So, at some point, I think he will either do some research or just have a gut feeling.” Neither is likely to make or break his candidacy. But do you ever know, really, when you’re going to rendezvous with destiny? ♦
