JFK (Just For Kerry)

[James A. Landau]

re Gerald Cohen's question, "does the humorous reinterpreting of what
initials stand for occur in other languages?"

In the Austro-Hungarian Empire the monarch was both "kaiser" (of Austria) and
"koenig" (of Hungary).  There was a rigid protocol involving whether an
action or award or whatever derived merely one of these offices, or from both.  If
the latter, then the abbreviation  "k. k." was used (I believe it was in small
letters, I'm not sure about the periods).

Of course not everybody in the "Dual Monarchy" took this seriously.  "k. k."
was sometimes interpreted as a pair of German words, which are unknown to me
but which refer to excrement.

Source---a lecture in 1983 by a European History professor named Marcia
Rosenblitz (name probably misspelled).

       - Jim Landau