AtDDtA(16): The Fatal Word

[Ya Sam]

>Not just Spanish; most western European languages. In German it's even
>pronounced the same as K-K (Kaiserlich und Königlich, see Max Khäutsch
>and Franz Ferdinand episodes).
>

In Musil's 'The Man without Qualities' The Austro-Hungarian Empire is called 
Kakania:

'There, in Kakania, that misunderstood State that has since vanished, which 
was in so many things a model, though all unacknowledged, there was speed 
too, of course; but not too much speed. Whenever one thought of that country 
from some place abroad, the memory that hovered before the eyes was of wide, 
white, prosperous roads dating from the age of foot-travellers and 
mail-coaches, roads leading in all directions like rivers of established 
order, streaking the countryside like of bright military twin, the 
paper-white arm of government holding the provinces in firm embrace. And 
what provinces! There were glaciers and the sea, the Carso and the 
cornfields of Bohemia nights by the Adriatic restless with the chirping of 
cicadas, and Slovakian villages where the smoke rose from the chimneys as 
from upturned nostrils, the village curled up between two little hills as 
though the earth had parted its lips to warm its child ?between them. Of 
course cars also drove along those roads--? but not too many cars! The 
conquest of the air had begun here too; but not too intensively. Now and 
then a ship was sent off to South America or the Far East; but not too 
often. There was no ambition to have world markets and world power. Here one 
was in the centre of Europe, at the focal point of world's old axes; the 
words 'colony' and 'overseas' had the ring of something as yet utterly 
untried and remote. There was some display of luxury; but it was not, of 
course, as over-sophisticated as that of the French. One went in for sport; 
but not in madly Anglo-Saxon fashion. One spent tremendous sums the army; 
but only just enough to assure one of remaining the second weakest among the 
great powers. The capital, too, was somewhat smaller than all the rest of 
the world's largest cities, but nevertheless quite considerably larger than 
a mere ordinary large city. And the administration of this country was 
carried out in an enlightened, hardly perceptible manner, with a cautious 
clipping of all sharp points, by the best bureaucracy m Europe, which could 
be accused of only one defect: it could not help regarding genius and 
enterprise of genius in private persons, unless privileged by high birth or 
State appointment, as ostentation, indeed presumption. But who would want 
unqualified I persons putting their oar in, anyway? And besides, in Kakania 
it was only that a genius was always regarded as a lout, but never, as 
sometimes happened elsewhere, that a mere lout was regarded as a genius.'

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