The president has been the rightful target of much mockery for his “Pahkistahn” pronounciation (a pronunciation defended again just yesterday by Tunku Varadarajan), but I heard something positively hilarious on NPR this week. (Yes, I’m an NPR type of guy — but I love Rush!) There was a report on our South Asian imbroglio and the reporter repeatedly used — in the very same sentence — the Obama-ite pronunciation of Pakistan but the normal American pronunciation of Afghanistan. (And I just noticed the president himself does the same thing.) Look, if you’re going to say “Pahkistahn,” you need to also say “Ahf-ghan-i-stahn,” with a voiced uvular fricative for the “gh,” kind of like a French “r”. And you should also say “Soorya” for Syria, and “Italia” for Italy, and “Suomi” for Finland, and “Hayastan” for Armenia, etc., etc. Anything else is both ignorant and affected, like Moliere’s middle-class gentleman bragging about having spoken in prose his whole life.