Caterpillar Cowboy

The text of Obama’s daily briefings includes phonetic spellings of names and places, or the person briefing him will coach him how to say them. Phonetic spellings are also there in Obama’s prepared remarks — although that doesn’t always mean the words wind up rolling off his tongue. “Did I pronounce your name right?” Obama said Tuesday, pausing after he acknowledged a woman named Alfa Demmellash during an event with nonprofit groups. Demmellash let the president know he had. “Good,” Obama said. “When your name is Barack Obama, you’re sensitive to these things.” The audience laughed, but Obama takes pronunciations quite seriously. His aides know that this is an area where the president wants to be right. In Obama’s view, pronouncing someone’s name or hometown correctly is a simple way of showing respect, they say. It’s a sort of baseline diplomacy. That’s particularly so in foreign relations, where aides say the president will privately practice pronouncing a leader’s name a number times before saying it publicly.