Half-assed Mnemonic Acronyms for All Those -stan Countries: TTUPAKK or KKAPUTT
The suffix -stan means "country" for the seven Central Asian nations which have names ending in this syllable:
- Afghanistan
- Kazakhstan
- Kyrgyzstan
- Pakistan (the name of which, oddly, is already an acronym in English)
- Tajikistan
- Turkmenistan
- Uzbekistan
KKAPUTT - A slurred variation of kaputt or kaput, incapicated or destroyed.
TTUPAKK - A misspelled shout-out to the patron saint of 1990's rap, Tupac Shakur.
Enjoy.
Source: CIA Factbook
2 comments:
A few people have asked me, What about Kurdistan?
Well, Kurdistan isn't a country, but an area of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, & Syria where the Kurdish ethnicity constitutes a majority or significant minority.
For what it's worth, I wish Kurdistan were a country. If the dice had rolled differently after World War I, it would be a country.
Even though most Americans have a post-9/11 fascination with the Middle East, it bothers me that a great number of well-educated folks here are nonetheless unaware of how the boundaries of Middle Eastern countries were drawn rather abitrarily by the French and the English in the Treaties of Sèvres and Lausanne.
These are ancient cultures, but recent countries.
I just received a discount on a haircut for correctly guessing that the stylist was from Kazakstan.
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