This is not linguistics

To who it may concern:
This is not linguistics:

when Justice Sonia Sotomayor was having trouble with an Italian word Monday, she turned to Scalia, the court's resident language maven.

Nor is it 'language maven' material. It's pronouncing names in a foreign language, nothing more:

Sotomayor hesitated as she was about to say the name of an Italian cruise line that figured in the opinion she was summarizing involving a woman who broke her leg on a cruise.

"Costa Cruises responded that she should have sued a related company called Costa – I'm going to ask my colleague Justice Scalia to say it right," Sotomayor said. The company's name is Costa Crociere.

"Kroo-chee-ER-ay," said Scalia, the son of a professor of Romance languages at Brooklyn College.

It's nice that he helped her out, don't get me wrong, but don't make too much of it ...


Image, and it's a brilliant and beautiful one, n'est-ce pas?, from here.