The way St. Louisans pronounce it. These ridiculous foppish East Coasters with their nasal PEW-lit-zer pronunciation are wrong. Wrong! It’s Puhl-it-zer. Named for our own Joseph, who emigrated here from Hungary, where Pulitzer is a common family name. Originating in the village of Pullitz, it’s sometimes spelled Politzer—try pronouncing that with a “pew”!
Once Joseph Pulitzer had made his way to St. Louis, he drove mules, schlepped baggage, waited tables, and spent the rest of his time hunched over books at the Mercantile Library, studying English and law. By the age of 31, he owned the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; five years later, he added the New York World.
It’s fitting that his namesake prize is extended to literature and music: Joseph favored a storytelling style, urging his reporters to seek “what is original, dramatic, romantic…odd, apt to be talked about” (without forsaking accuracy, of course). Colorful, intelligent, and socially conscious, his “Western journalism” won over the New Yorkers. But he worked himself too hard, and by age 43 he was virtually blind and excruciatingly sensitive to noise. Using an elaborate codebook for confidentiality, he ran his papers from soundproofed rooms in Bar Harbor and on his yacht, where he died in 1911.
The following year, his bequest established the Columbia School of Journalism, where the first Pulitzer Prize—for which he’d left clear instructions—was awarded in 1917. It went to a New York World reporter who’d gone “Inside the German Empire” at the Great War’s end. Over the next century, Pulitzer Prizes would acknowledge intrepid reporting of strikes and police riots, corporate and government corruption, racial tension and violence, abuse in mental hospitals, natural (and unnatural) disasters…
On April 15, we’ll learn the 2019 winners, so brace yourself for a fresh round of PEW-litzer. The Poynter Institute once grew so frustrated with the dueling pronunciations, it polled a few real Pulitzers. “My husband said that his father told people to say ‘Pull it sir’” was Emily Rauh Pulitzer’s reply. Why, then, is the venerable prize so oft mispronounced? The answer, writes linguistics prof Edwin L. Battistella on the Oxford University Press website, lies in the way we articulate our consonants or raise our vowels—specifically, our “u-palatalization,” or treatment of consonants before a long u sound. “A palatal semivowel(a gliding sound represented by the phonetic symbol /j/ but often spelled with a Y in popular transcriptions) occurs between the consonant and the long ‘u’ vowel,” he explains.
Poppycock. It’s those East Coast types trying to tell us how to talk.
