guff

More on the name

Beside the regular barrage of misspellings, technical ASCII prejudice and plain old weirdness, there’s an inconvenience to travelling through life with a moniker like Kafkaesquí. (Imposed at birth? Self-inflicted? Does it matter?) First, there’s a scent of spuriousness about it. Just a hint of a whiff, but it’s there. And unlike a majority of first names, it fails to bring along a meaning or history. You certainly can’t trace it back to ancient Rome where it was applied to cat milkers. However, we can parse it down to its morphemic units and have a little fun in the process. At my expense, naturally.

So let’s take that trip, shall we?

Kafka - Franz; dead Czech writer (1883-1924)
esquí - ski; skiing (español)

So, what to make of that? A hostile act of incongruity, if anything. Kafkaesquí is loaded with the stuff. How discordant it sounds; those two things should not be brought together on a page, let alone a mountainside (though some have tried). If I said my middle name was Irony, who could seriously doubt it?

Never mind that at root to this madness is far more likely a mosh of the phrase Kafka estaba aquí. Something like that so utterly complicates the tour I have to stop the bus and force everyone off. Hopefully you can find your way home.