Final Word from Monday, April 25, 2016

The "renaming" of the Czech Republic is like a page out of a Jára Cimrman play. News outlets from across the globe, from Izvestia to the New York Times, announced that the "new name" would be Czechia and only further on revealed that the name wasn't changing after all. A short version was merely being added, and the country would officially remain the Czech Republic. More articles will now be needed to set the record straight. How did this confusion come about? A clue is provided by Cimrman's play, "The Investigation of the Loss of the Class Attendance Book." The attendance book had been missing for seven years, and the teacher couldn't get any of the pupils to admit to taking it. The problem, the teacher said, was that the class was made up entirely of morons and nincompoops sitting next to each other. "Just look," he said. "Moron, nincompoop, moron, nincompoop, moron, nincompoop, moron, nincompoop." The only exception, he said, was at the back, where two nincompoops were sitting next to each other." That would be Karla Šlechtová's development ministry. [Czech Republic regional CzechTourism]