The trick to pronouncing the last name of presidential candidate and South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg is to keep your lips almost totally puckered through all three syllables. At least, that's the only way I'm able to do it. If I can get my lips halfway between a pout and a whistle, and say it in one quick exhale, I can get it: Bood-eh-jedge, bood-eh-jedge, bood-eh-jedge.

I learned this a few days ago from watching video after YouTube video of Buttigieg saying his own name. Until then, whenever I'd read the name Buttigieg—which wasn't that often, until very recently—I'd read over the weird spelling, make the sound "boojig" in my mind, and move on. I was sure I'd never say the name aloud—and let's be real, who has time to learn new things anyway?

Then, starting in early March, Buttigieg started popping up everywhere. A trickle of weird and unforgettable facts began seeping into the news cycle, each one more idiosyncratic and pure than the last. There was the one about how in high school he had read a book by a Norwegian author that he liked so much that he taught himself Norwegian to read the untranslated works of the same author. There was his fluency with the oeuvre of James Joyce. (Running for office is "definitely more like Ulysses than it is like Portrait," Esquire quoted him as saying. His father was a Joyce scholar.) There was the charming Twitter tale of how he'd given up his first class seat to the woman in coach who was sitting next to his husband, so that the two could spend a little time together. Then there was the heartfelt letter he sent the Muslim community in South Bend after last week's horrific massacre in New Zealand.

Pete Buttigieg is having a moment. This week, CNN declared him the "hottest candidate in the 2020 race." Which … maybe? Either way, it was time for me to learn his name.

Apparently, I wasn't alone. Type "pronounce" into Google and the first autosuggestion that comes up is "pronounce Buttigieg." According to Google Trends, searches for that term have shot up 669 percent since the first week of March. Go to YouTube and you'll find all sorts of videos on how to do it. Type the phrase into Twitter and you'll find a ton of people who are wondering how to pronounce Buttigieg, have recently learned how to pronounce Buttigieg, are trying to teach other people how to pronounce Buttigieg, are worried they pronounce Buttigieg offensively, or have given up and decided that if he wins the presidency they are going to call him "President Mayor Pete"—a reference to his nickname in South Bend.

The real question may be, can someone be president of the United States of America if their name is this hard to pronounce? But as with all guesses about electability, it's impossible to predict. It could work out in his favor, since the difficulty of his name also makes it memorable. And once you learn how to say it, you feel invested. It's also worth noting that Barack Obama wasn't a simple name for people to understand back when he first ran, either. Plus, Buttigieg may have the hardest name to pronounce out of the long list of Democratic candidates, but he's hardly the only name people are struggling with.

What is it about Buttigieg, though, that makes it particularly hard to say? I called up two linguists who study phonetics, pronunciation, and immigrant names to find out. Before I called, I practiced how to say the name right, but when I got Simon Fraser University linguistics professor Murray Munro's voicemail, I immediately flubbed it: "I'm a reporter from WIRED calling with a question about how to pronounce the name of presidential candidate Pete Booteh-jidge," I said into his voicemail. "Dammit," I added.