Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani is a man of many names. New Yorkers are still figuring out what to call him.
The city’s tabloids have proclaimed him “Zo,” “Zoh” or “Mam,” seemingly unsure which sobriquet will stick. He is “Z” to his staff — and to his mother. In his youthful rapping days, he performed as “Young Cardamom” (that one hasn’t reached City Hall), and recently he has been seen toting a leather folio embossed with an understated “ZKM.”
From the Little Flower (Fiorello La Guardia) to Rudy (Rudolph W. Giuliani), Bloomy (Michael R. Bloomberg) and Blaz (Bill de Blasio), just about every New York City mayor ends up with a nickname, whether he likes it or not. It’s not yet clear which endearment (or not-so-endearment) will endure.
But as with many things in his job — snowstorms, rats, runaway horse carriages — the mayor can control only so much before the tastemakers at the tabloids swoop in to have their say.
The New York Post, whose covers serve as a kind of graphic Greek chorus of city life, has vowed to lead the effort. “SAY IT AIN’T ZO!” the paper declared the morning before Mr. Mamdani’s shock victory in last year’s Democratic primary, coining a front-page-friendly abbreviation.
“‘Zo’ and ‘Mam’ are easy to fit in headlines, but we reserve the right to play with his name every single day,” Keith Poole, The Post’s editor in chief, said by email. He added, “You can be sure that Chairman Zo will have more by the time he’s done!”
Not one to yield to a rival, The New York Daily News has put its own lexical spin on the mayoral moniker. Ahead of Sunday’s blizzard, the city’s second major storm in a month, The Daily News went with “HERE WE ZOH AGAIN,” deploying an extra letter, in sharp contrast to The Post.
“We always want to deliver maximum value to our readers, and so including the H seemed like the way to go,” said Andrew Julien, The Daily News’s executive editor. “As far as the alternate ‘Zo’ goes, perhaps the better question is whether The Post is going to switch to ‘Zoh,’ because ‘Zoh’ is better, more specific and a clearer abbreviation of Zohran.”
Mr. Mamdani’s name has played a unique role in his political rise.
His mayoral campaign was branded as “Zohran for New York City,” and his rivals had trouble, consciously or not, pronouncing his name during televised debates. In a moment that launched a thousand memes, Mr. Mamdani memorably corrected former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo for repeatedly referring to him as “Mr. Man-Dami.”
“The name is ‘Mamdani,’” Mr. Mamdani instructed Mr. Cuomo. “M-A-M-D-A-N-I. You should learn how to say it.”
But among intimates like senior aides, former soccer teammates and his mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair (who also calls him “Zohru,” “Fadoose” and “Nonstop Mamdani”), Mr. Mamdani is often referred to simply as “Z.” It is an expedient diminutive for dashed-off texts and emails: During the campaign, reporters became accustomed to hearing from harried aides, “Let me see if I can get you five minutes with Z.”
As it turns out, the letter Z has a rich pedigree at New York’s City Hall.
It is, of course, the zigzagging centerpiece of “Hizzoner,” the immortal New Yorkese nickname for mayors that dates back more than 100 years. The musical “Hizzoner!” (yes, with an exclamation point), a one-man show about Mr. La Guardia, opened on Broadway in February 1989 and closed 10 days later. That same year, Mayor Edward I. Koch published a book of conversations with Cardinal John O’Connor under the title, “His Eminence and Hizzoner: A Candid Exchange.”
David N. Dinkins’s single term as mayor may have been doomed from the day that The Post screamed on its cover: “Crime-ravaged city cries out for help: DAVE, DO SOMETHING!”
Mr. Giuliani was almost always simply “Rudy.” Mr. Bloomberg was “Bloomy,” as in “GLOOMY BLOOMY,” a Post headline trumpeting his pessimistic economic forecast. For a spell, when Mr. Bloomberg tried unsuccessfully to ban the sale of jumbo sodas, he was the “Nanny in Chief.”
Asked at a recent cocktail party about his tabloid nicknames, Mr. Bloomberg smirked but demurred. Sometimes, he said, New Yorkers just called him “Hey you.”
Mr. de Blasio was treated to a series of creative tabloid insults, typically variations on the ur-nickname “Blaz,” per The Daily News, or “Blas,” in Post parlance. Last year, The Post packed two memorable Z’s into a cover about Mr. de Blasio’s endorsement of Mr. Mamdani: “PUTZ FOR NUTZ.”
(Mr. de Blasio, who stands 6-foot-5 and seven-eighths of an inch, was also sometimes jeered as “Big Bird,” whom the former mayor later appraised as “one of the better ‘Sesame Street’ characters.” “I wouldn’t say it made my heart sing,” he said of the epithet, “but it had something good to it.”)
The ideal mayoral nickname is short and sweet, the better to fit within a print newspaper’s narrow columns. (Mr. de Blasio’s full eight-letter surname — nine if you count the space — was a tad ungainly.) Eric Adams’s pithy name did not lend itself to shortening, so puns like “UP AND ADAMS” prevailed.
The Post, which is owned by the conservative mogul Rupert Murdoch, has seized on Mr. Mamdani’s socialist leanings to depict him as an out-of-control leftist. An early Mamdani cover blared, “DANGEROUS MAM.” The paper has also tested out “SCAMDANI.”
When Mr. Mamdani won in November, The Post went with “THE RED APPLE: On your Marx, get set, Zo!” The cover, accompanied by an illustration of Mr. Mamdani brandishing a hammer and sickle, was so popular that the newspaper began selling it on coffee mugs and T-shirts.
If the mayor has a take on his tabloid nicknames, his press office isn’t letting on. Mr. Mamdani is partial to a more straightforward title, according to a City Hall spokeswoman, Dora Pekec.
“The mayor,” she said, “prefers to be addressed as Mayor Mamdani.”
Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016.
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