Another noted: “They’re getting free publicity – they ought to have been happy to have a funny name."
Free publicity that leads to sign posts being stolen. For a tiny village of 100 people, this is likely a serious hardship. If it isn't bringing in more money than it's costing them, it's an attractive nuisance, not free publicity.
It's bizarre.
Yes, but they don't post about it online, so no-one hears from them. They might even choose to live in a village with a 3-digit population count.
Prank phone calls are definitely more annoying than some tourists taking a picture at the town sign.
I do not know if this is true in the specific case but I have met idiots who stole street signs, so this seems at least plausible.
It's a tiny village. Such places often have a real sense of community that you don't have elsewhere. Injecting a lot of sexual nonsense into their little town because of the name likely feels rather rapey to them.
That's sort of like the old fashioned advice that if a woman is going to be raped and can't avoid it, she should try to enjoy the ride -- which is all kinds of deeply offensive and morally depraved.
These people find this behavior offense, offensive enough that they changed the name. They don't seem to find the name offensive. They seem to only find the behavior of random people coming to their village offensive and they don't know another way to stop it.
Edit: quite - quiet
But what I found more fascinating is that there is bus line number 666 going from Debki to Hel in Poland (Debki sounds bit like "depky" which is diminutive for depressions in Czech).
As to why this is, I've heard a number of theories. One is that people used to be less prudish and this kind of talk was much more commonplace back in the day. Also that the culture up north is more conducive to crude language. It's also possible that when these areas were being surveyed, the locals made some of these names up just to mess with the likely southern officials sent to talk to them.
Also I've heard that this is why there are so many lakes named "Holy lake" ("pyhäjärvi") - at some point, enough was enough and the officials just stopped accepting the local names. True or not, who knows.
There are some good place names too, like "Shitterton", "Cockermouth", and "Bell End". Only Shitterton is intentional, though. It does literally mean "town near the place where you have a poo"
Jewsons, a builders merchant in the UK did a brilliant take on this in one of their adverts.
Weird (to me, an english speaker with no knowledge of modern or 11th century Austrian) that they went with Fugging and not, say, Focking.
Also, a "Fock" is a pig in Austrian and Bavarian dialects, so "Focking" would be indicative of "pigs place" or "where the pigs are from", which hardly sounds like a desirable name for ones village.
My personal favourite is the small Devon village of Toller Porcorum, which has historically also been called "Swines Toller" and "Hog Toller".
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-joy-of-pigs-smart-clean-...
All the time, they would have had people scraping away some paint turning the "o" into a "u"...
A friend of mine was born in a place called Time on the southwest coast, and quips after just about every flight that he was born in Time and had to go through Hell to get wherever he's at.
Oh, and as a special treat for the Germans reading this - a former colleague's last name was Ficken. He did not enjoy checking into hotels in Germany.
Welcome to HEL
The main spoken language in Ireland is English and the construction of the name strongly implies it was not an etymological accident.
Along the north coast, you will find a town called Çarşamba (Wednesday), which if you continue to drive for a few hours is followed by a town called Perşembe (Thursday).
"Some have reportedly even stolen the signposts, leading the local authorities to use theft-resistant concrete when putting up replacements."
It's sad and a disgrace that a town has to rename itself after a thousand years, because people whose intellectual capacity is questionable won't stop with the abuse.
EDIT: I'm sure David Mitchell was right when he said that the world is calibrated for "idiots".
I guess that's all in the Fucking past now :-(
To add confusion Austria will then have two places "Fugging, formerly known as Fucking".
A lot of town names in that area are like this for some probably not-perverse reason.
I remember two things clearly about that train:
1. If you are sitting close enough to the front and lean out far enough, you get hot steam mist droplets painfully scalding your skin.
2. The train indeed went to Paradise, PA, with a big welcome sign, and I remember thinking "Is this a joke? I guess some people aren't very good at humor." I really don't know what I did expect or what would have impressed me more.
https://www.discoverlancaster.com/blog/wacky-town-names-lanc...
*Sound shift from fuck.
Interjection fug
Euphemistic form of fuck. quotations ▲
- 1985, Herbert A. Applebaum, Blue Chips, Brunswick Pub. Co., page 126:
It's always somethin' or other. Ah, fug it. I'm away now.
Oh fug. Whad a mess.
“Why is this door locked?” she shouts. “Oh fug!”https://www.google.com/search?q=spurdo+fug
:DD
Tourism? Nah. They'll just take a picture, buy a soda and leave. People want to live their quiet lives. Change the name and be done.
>>Just across the border in Bavaria in Germany there is a village called Petting.
I guess they kept going from petting to f* and the other way around for centuries.
The issue is that regularly people steal the town signs or that people come, take pictures of them fucking (sometimes literally sometimes just in gesture) in front of the sign and leave, thus annoy the citizens.
As a Brit who swears constantly, uses a lot of slang, and enjoys drowning every sentence with relatively acerbic sarcasm I'm curious how I'd fit in polite American society.
Because, a line doesn’t have any holes and a fraction just gives you a point, such that no matter how close you are to another number there will always be gap.
Advocacy mode = 1
This topic is close to my heart. I've done a significant amount of community work in my past, and inoculating members of it against offense, promoting mutual understanding works wonders, and there are greater implications on our speech and how it may come to be regulated should more of us continue to fail to get along well enough to make it all productive.
Just want to share some hard won insights here, that's all and I am taking you seriously for a moment to highlight something important about "bad" words that your question leads to and that may be of value to others.
In the US, the First Amendment is being questioned. There are lots of reasons for this, and they aren't all appropriate here. But, it's being questioned.
The right to not be offended is coming up a lot too. Some of this is cultural imports / clashes as the globe continues to communicate across basically one Internet ...from other parts of the world where speech is considerably more regulated. And some of it boils down to people lacking the tools needed to handle a dialog properly.
These two things aren't an inclusive treatment on this topic, they just stick right out.
You are quite right. Words are just words. People are just people too, so let's explore that just a bit:
Fact is, we are as offended as we think we are. Offensive, or bad, or profane words, are generally offensive in some fashion or other. Norms largely dictate which words fall into these buckets.
Sometimes law differentiates words too.
From Lessig:
Human behavior is regulated by 4 basic forces, and they are physics, money, law, norms.
Physics and money actually prevent actions. If the universe doesn't allow something, it's not gonna happen, or at least won't happen until our understanding of the rules improves enough to engineer it to happen. Fair enough, right? Money presents a cost barrier in a similar fashion. No money, no act, given a sufficient cost to inhibit said act. Similar work arounds, such as using other people's money are in play that parallel our understanding.
The point being physics and money (or markets) actually inhibit actions.
Law is a post fact force. Law doesn't actually prevent anything as much as it can bring a remedy, or civil cost to having done a thing, and having been caught doing it.
Norms work like laws do, minus the courtroom in the vast majority of cases, however one may still experience significant personal costs when violating norms and having been called out, caught doing it.
Back to being offended.
It's all very subjective. A combination of words spoken to one person may be seen as ordinary, benign, laughable, and so forth, but not necessarily offensive, and for sure not criminal. Another person receives those words, and it's definitely offensive, and may be criminal in both the law and norm sense.
(I'm using criminal as a parallel to violating a norm in a particular egregious manner such that there may be a public debate about having done it, and a sort of conviction related to the outcome of that debate, and it's for simplicity, not actually implying norms are in any way criminalized, nor should be, though in some parts of the world they are anyway, but I very seriously digress.)
Given this subjectivity, it's both very hard to understand what might offend someone, and equally hard to understand whether someone is gaming the idea of being offended to gain advantage, position or leverage, or even standing somehow!
Before I continue, there is weighting too.
Truth is, some stranger we don't know, who may or may not know something about us, just doesn't garner much in the way of weight or credence. Context plays a big role here too, but I'm going to keep it simple. (sort of, this topic is hard)
Boiled down, what can we do when someone online calls us an ass, or speaks of the profane, or vulgar?
Go the other way, and say someone we know well, we value, that knows us does that? Ouch! And maybe that needs to hurt a little. The weight is more significant. Worth consideration, but still not worth righteous indignation any more than the other extreme is.
Weigh that speech, first and foremost!
And realize we all have options too:
The most common is righteous indignation. It is by far the number one response, and in my view, a very significant contributor to the idea of free speech being of increasingly dubious value. It's also completely unnecessary!
If we don't want conversations to go bad, then it's on us to manage our end of the conversation, use the options we have, weigh speech we encounter, and communicate clearly enough for others to understand us better.
Where people don't do that, or expect someone else to do that for them, lots of problems crop up, and it's this dynamic that also puts speech under threat.
Other options include:
Humor --when a rando calls you an ass, laugh! That's about all it's worth. Other examples should follow easily.
Redirect --Back the conversation up, communicate, attempt to get past the matter with better, ideally mutual understanding.
End the dialog. Maybe it's just not worth continuing given someone is gaming being offended, or perhaps just has too many triggers for it to make meaningful conversation difficult, low value.
Seek clarity. Intent, particularly via text, is extremely difficult to discern. It's often not possible to do it with sufficient fidelity to warrant being offended. So don't be. Getting clear on something is powerful, and it's often going to result in a greater bond between participants too. Mutual understanding is a powerful basis for trust and trust is a powerful vaccine against offense and conversations going badly that just don't have to go badly.
Sidebar: On the topic of intent, a while back some people ran an experiment on Slashdot. The idea was simple, and it was for people to write out what various exchanges in a discussion thread meant to them. In other words, their "take" on the whole thing.
These varied considerably from what people thought the real intent was! I participated in this and was stunned to learn most intent is implied, unless very directly stated in fairly formal terms. On your next few threads, consider this idea. Or better, review one as a non-participant. You will see errors in parsing intent run rampant, and may also understand more about why the burden to keep conversations good is a shared one, and why seeking to control others is often futile too.
Just know the intent you perceive is extremely likely to not be what the writer intended, and their context being very different from yours. Culture, norms, station in life, etc...
End Sidebar.
There really aren't "bad" words. Just differences. And there is a shared burden here, not some inherent right to not be offended. We have no way to handle that in a meaningful way without also watering down speech to the point where we will begin to also fail to understand one another and even accurately represent who we are individually. (which drives more failure to understand, and that's a very bad cycle)
Burden is on all of us here, both as speakers and as listeners. And there are options available to us and we should be using them long before we arrive at righteous indignation. If we do use them?
"bad" words become an academic discussion, not a painful, or expensive one.
Advocacy mode = 0
https://www.bierlinie-shop.de/a-640
They clearly also had some fun with the name
Hopefully Fuckerberg, Austria never changes.
"Sometime in the past, we were actually Fucking"
The Fuggers were famous - perhaps even infamous - bankers.
"World Taekwondo, called the World Taekwondo Federation until June 2017, is the international federation governing the sport of taekwondo and is a member of the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF).[2] The body was renamed in June 2017 to avoid the "negative connotations" of the previously used initials WTF."
Too bad Tuli Kupferberg isn't around to see it.
Fugg!
Fugg me. Fugg you. This is fugged. You fugger. WTF.
Yes, it will suffice.
But, on a serious note, I think this will backfire. It's one thing to not have a knife in you, it's totally another to remove one that is already in because you'd rather it wasn't there in the first place.
They are now officially 'the village formerly known as Fucking'. You can be sure the pranks will continue (possibly even more annoying because now people will be putting on an 'accent' when saying "Fugging").
I don't know what a better solution to this problem would be, but this doesn't mean I can recognise a bad solution when I see it.
quick trip to Urbandictionary.com folks
Its worked accurately enough for decades to share a regional context
[0]: https://www.pornhub.com/premiumplaces
(Note: SFW webpage, but still on the PH domain)
Based on social media analysis see when there's a "high season" of idiots
Buy domain fuckingaustria.com or something more clever.
Get 100 tshirts with a town sign illustration, bumper stickers, mugs, wool hats and jumpers (which will be worn across all Europe by EU roaming English speakers on road tours), a roadside market permit, sell them and on the side offer informative pamphlets and mailing list subscriptions about the town and what locals do. Rinse and repeat while pushing what Fucking really is about, always with a deadpan take that leaves wondering wether you're serious or not.
It's what New Zealand's president did with the country not being shown on several maps. Instead of a hissy fit, use humor to point at a problem.
We have a Prime Minister.