JFK (Just For Kerry)

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:01 AM -0500 2/10/04, James A. Landau wrote:
>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.

Are you sure "k.k." was interpreted as a German initialism?  More
likely, I'd think, as "caca".  (isn't the letter _k_ pronounced [ka]
in German?)

larry

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