I saw this headline on Yahoo news: “O’bama? President’s distant roots have Irish Americans smiling” and I thought to myself, “It appears that I’m not the only one calling him by his Americanized name”
You’ve probably noticed that I have referred to the Manchurian President as O’bama for almost a year. My reasoning has been that Americans generally do not pronounce words with a “long a” sound. For example, Americans typically pronounce the name “Iran” as “eye-ran” (the proper pronunciation is more like “ee-ron”). Thus, I always thought it was unusual for citizen to be saying his name. Hence, I inserted the apostrophe between the “O” and the “bama” so you can pronounce it just like that southern state — “Oh – bama”.