Ironists of a Vanished Empire

I would have imagined Musil was thinking of the Greek kakistos (κάκιστος; worst).

This is for example the root of the word Kakistocracy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakistocracy

I wonder if that existed as a thing beyond the normal linguistic drift. I see a lot of linguistic drift in my families genealogy research. It continues to the present day which is awash in Jaxsons, Kathrinns, Mykels, Jessikya/Jessyka/Jessekas, and Camrinns. Those are all from my daughter's recently received elementary school yearbook.

Sort of like a long time ago tattoos were super rebellious, but times have changed and now not having a tattoo is being hyper rebellious, misspelling your kids name or playing phonetics games used to be rebellious but now times have changed and it would be hyper rebellious to name your kid "John". I didn't misspell my daughter's name at all, and now she doesn't fit in.

Cultural drift in names is not new at all. Decades ago I dated a girl with a legal name right out of Tolkien's Silmarillion. A former boss dated a daughter of a hippie with the first name "Marijuana", which is so rare it might be doxxable. At least some gen-x kids received rare names.

Also in my genealogical research a lot of German, or generally axis powers, names disappeared around WW1 and WW2 for obvious reasons. They had immigrated a century ago and their grand kids dropped a lot of European vowels and consonants, making my genealogical research extra complicated. You might be amazed at the prefixes some -smiths or -schneiders used to have. My handful of Irish ancestors randomly added and subtracted letter O and some vowels, also.

I dunno, when I lived in the Fareast I adopted a localized forename and surname. I went by that with locals, and went by my birth name with most foreigners. And I was not alone in that. It was no big deal. It made it easier for locals to write and pronounce my name.

You clearly have not stopped, for any reason, using "we" to mean "Americans".

Some people do still do it to fit in, or because they don't like having their actual name mispronounced/misspelt.

It's not for no reason -- lots of people who go other places than America / English speaking countries adopt names in the local language as well, for convenience and ease of movement in the local culture.

Explaining how to pronounce a name with multiple vowels in a row is goddamn hard in a lot of places.