"Don’t people have any sense of humour these days?” asked one OOeN reader.
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.
Yeah, I just cannot comprehend what is going on in this discussion. Is this the same HN that hates Facebook for all of its privacy issues? But the people in some small village somehow forfeited their right to privacy because a few hundred years ago it was named something that now sounds funny to people in a different language?
> In 2012, there were reports that the village of Fucking in Upper Austria attempted to change its name to Fugging through a referendum after receiving large amounts of prank phone calls from English speakers about the village's name.[3] According to these reports, they were unable to do so because Fugging in Lower Austria was already so named;
Prank phone calls are definitely more annoying than some tourists taking a picture at the town sign.
I guess if monetized properly big part of those 100 people could live off the name alone. It's also sad to see this tiny cultural artifact go just because few people are inconvenienced. The stone roads and tiny alleys in the old town are inconvenient yet we don't go bulldozing it all down.
How do you think they can monetize it? How do you monetize random strangers coming to your town, taking photos of themselves in sometimes "lascivious poses" with your sign and sometimes stealing it? What's the business angle there?
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.
Spoken like a true entrepreneur. But you know, there are people out there, in small villages that have quiet lives that nobody ever hears about and they are perfectly happy. I'm really amazed at all the "We can monetize this" and "It's free publicity" statements here. How about admiring these people for their wish to maintain tranquility in the village the know and love?
In Czech republic there is a town called "Horní Police". I saw memes with it, but I dont't find it funny because in Czech it actually means just "Upper Shelf". (But I understand what does it mean for english speaking ppl.)
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).
Finland has a lot of intentionally rude place names, especially in the north. Places like "cunt pond" ("vittulampi"), "cockpile" ("kullirova"), "cuntwhistle bog" ("vitunviheltämänjänkä") etc.
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"
My advisor (Finnish) told me almost every one’s last name is some form of “Järvi”; when the Finns were asked to pick a last name, the guidance was to use a profession or a major physical landmark near them. There are 10s of thousands of lakes (järvi)...
They probably let the builders name it. If you have ever worked on a building site you will have found that every noun is preceeded by the word fucking.
Jewsons, a builders merchant in the UK did a brilliant take on this in one of their adverts.
> The village was first officially inhabited in about 1070, but local lore suggests that a sixth-century Bavarian nobleman called Focko actually founded the settlement. A map dating from 1825 used the spelling Fuking.
Weird (to me, an english speaker with no knowledge of modern or 11th century Austrian) that they went with Fugging and not, say, Focking.
There's actually another village called Fugging in Lower Austria, i assume the name was chosen to keep it phonetically close to Fucking but within the linguistic boundaries of "common" village names.
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.
Swindon ("Pig Hill", a large town of about 180,000 people in Southwest England) is just one of many places named after pigs- why wouldn't you name your village after its main agricultural product?
My personal favourite is the small Devon village of Toller Porcorum, which has historically also been called "Swines Toller" and "Hog Toller".
As a German speaker, their choice seems quite natural, because it won't alter the modern pronunciation a lot. I'd even guess that the new spelling might represent a typical Austrian pronunciation with a soft "k" sound more accurately.
Is Austrian like Swiss German where "gg" is "k"?
If so the pronunciation might have not/barely changed for locals, but is no longer funny for English speakers.
Kumamoto in Japan has a similarly bad name in Swahili. If you break the city's name into 2 four-letter words, you get vagina (kuma) and hot (moto) in Swahili. Thankfully, Swahili speakers are not going to harass this city's residents anytime soon.
In Norway, we've got a place called Hell; you pass through it on the way from the town of Trondheim to its airport.
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.
The sign at Hell train station says "Hell Gods-expedition" (which is a slightly old Norwegian spelling meaning something like "Hell - Goods reception").
There was also the case of a guy with the last name Hell (which means "bright" in German). He wanted to be part of a church in the US and they denied him
At least the Finns are routinely turning this to their advantage. When there is an international (tech) conference in Helsinki, those flying in to the capital may be greeted with a sponsored banner:
Turkey has bad city names even in its own language.
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).
"They finally grew weary of Fucking, its current name, which some experts say dates back to the 11th century."
"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".
Haha. That's awesome. My nephew thought it was hilarious when he found Fucking on the map. We spent a quite a while joking about taking a Fucking vacation to Fucking Austria to see if they have a Fucking Starbucks where we could hang out with the Fucking people. But once my sister got annoyed I had to tell him to stop joking about the Fucking place and then we started all over. Lmfao.
Perhaps it's just not a uncommon kind of name in that part of Europe? For example, there's the historically significant and wealthy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugger_family which contains such august names as "Prince Hubertus Fugger von Babenhausen".
There is also another town called fugging on another part of austria, that used to be spelled fucking but changed name more than a century ago. Language drift seems a reasonable guess.
When I was about 8 in southwestern PA, we took a trip to central PA to visit Gettysburg, the Amish Country, Hershey, and all that. We took a steam train ride that promised a "trip to paradise".
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.
Released balloons at Easter from church in central Virginia as a kid. Had Easter egg clamped to the string containing a card with return request and address. Got a response a couple weeks later from someone near Intercourse, PA. Of course I found that hilarious but was also amazed at just how far my balloons flew.
As a Canadian (and Atlantic Canadian) I often see people mention Dildo. But I get an even bigger kick that's Dildo across the harbour from Spread Eagle.
There's more to this: Apparently there's another village in Lower Austria (east of this one which is in Upper Austria) which also used to be called Fucking but was renamed to Fugging a long time ago. Then Fucking, Upper Austria attempted to change its name to Fugging but failed because of the name clash with Fugging, Lower Austria. Incidentally they have their name from the same source as well.
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.
Well, "bad words" may be vulgarities, profanities, or obscenities. As a layman I would say it's not the word itself but the concept which crosses some moral boundary.
I suppose the silver lining is that swearing retains its potency as long as people find it offensive. In a sociopolitical sense, the n-word (evidence in itself right there) is the only one with any real weight attached to it any more.
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.
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.
"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."
Is it so hard to comprehend that maybe living in a nice Austrian village can be better without a golden egg-laying goose that is a huge nuisance? Not everyone is an entrepreneur who wants to make sacrifices in the holy name of $$$.
I know, I agree 100% (I was being a bit provocative on purpose :p ).
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.
Considering you cannot educate English speaking idiots, make a living out of them:
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.
"Don’t people have any sense of humour these days?” asked one OOeN reader.
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.
Moreover, is it really so difficult to imagine that there are still people that don't like publicity these days?
Yeah, I just cannot comprehend what is going on in this discussion. Is this the same HN that hates Facebook for all of its privacy issues? But the people in some small village somehow forfeited their right to privacy because a few hundred years ago it was named something that now sounds funny to people in a different language?
It's bizarre.
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> there are still people that don't like publicity these days
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.
> In 2012, there were reports that the village of Fucking in Upper Austria attempted to change its name to Fugging through a referendum after receiving large amounts of prank phone calls from English speakers about the village's name.[3] According to these reports, they were unable to do so because Fugging in Lower Austria was already so named;
Prank phone calls are definitely more annoying than some tourists taking a picture at the town sign.
GP didn't say taking pictures, but that the sign was being stolen.
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.
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Probably fair to assume that they weren’t raking in money from the “haha, the road sign has a rude word” tourism.
One ought not to tell people what they ought to want.
Sounds like an opportunity to sell road signs to tourists.
I doubt they tried this but I agree that they should have.
They could make millions from fucking tourists
They probably didn't, otherwise they would've not done it. They had hundreds of years of data to base that decision on.
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Make the t-shirts!
I guess if monetized properly big part of those 100 people could live off the name alone. It's also sad to see this tiny cultural artifact go just because few people are inconvenienced. The stone roads and tiny alleys in the old town are inconvenient yet we don't go bulldozing it all down.
How do you think they can monetize it? How do you monetize random strangers coming to your town, taking photos of themselves in sometimes "lascivious poses" with your sign and sometimes stealing it? What's the business angle there?
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.
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Spoken like a true entrepreneur. But you know, there are people out there, in small villages that have quiet lives that nobody ever hears about and they are perfectly happy. I'm really amazed at all the "We can monetize this" and "It's free publicity" statements here. How about admiring these people for their wish to maintain tranquility in the village the know and love?
Edit: quite - quiet
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Well, there was a lager called Fucking Hell.
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In Czech republic there is a town called "Horní Police". I saw memes with it, but I dont't find it funny because in Czech it actually means just "Upper Shelf". (But I understand what does it mean for english speaking ppl.)
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).
I can confirm the 666 bus - I go to the Hel peninsula often and it always makes me laugh
Finland has a lot of intentionally rude place names, especially in the north. Places like "cunt pond" ("vittulampi"), "cockpile" ("kullirova"), "cuntwhistle bog" ("vitunviheltämänjänkä") etc.
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.
Similar with "Grope Cunt Lane" in England https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gropecunt_Lane
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"
My advisor (Finnish) told me almost every one’s last name is some form of “Järvi”; when the Finns were asked to pick a last name, the guidance was to use a profession or a major physical landmark near them. There are 10s of thousands of lakes (järvi)...
They probably let the builders name it. If you have ever worked on a building site you will have found that every noun is preceeded by the word fucking.
Jewsons, a builders merchant in the UK did a brilliant take on this in one of their adverts.
> The village was first officially inhabited in about 1070, but local lore suggests that a sixth-century Bavarian nobleman called Focko actually founded the settlement. A map dating from 1825 used the spelling Fuking.
Weird (to me, an english speaker with no knowledge of modern or 11th century Austrian) that they went with Fugging and not, say, Focking.
There's actually another village called Fugging in Lower Austria, i assume the name was chosen to keep it phonetically close to Fucking but within the linguistic boundaries of "common" village names.
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.
Swindon ("Pig Hill", a large town of about 180,000 people in Southwest England) is just one of many places named after pigs- why wouldn't you name your village after its main agricultural product?
My personal favourite is the small Devon village of Toller Porcorum, which has historically also been called "Swines Toller" and "Hog Toller".
Pigs as dirty is an outdated, mostly religious based, meme.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-joy-of-pigs-smart-clean-...
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As a German speaker, their choice seems quite natural, because it won't alter the modern pronunciation a lot. I'd even guess that the new spelling might represent a typical Austrian pronunciation with a soft "k" sound more accurately.
Is Austrian like Swiss German where "gg" is "k"? If so the pronunciation might have not/barely changed for locals, but is no longer funny for English speakers.
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> Weird (to me, an english speaker with no knowledge of modern or 11th century Austrian) that they went with Fugging and not, say, Focking.
All the time, they would have had people scraping away some paint turning the "o" into a "u"...
Kumamoto in Japan has a similarly bad name in Swahili. If you break the city's name into 2 four-letter words, you get vagina (kuma) and hot (moto) in Swahili. Thankfully, Swahili speakers are not going to harass this city's residents anytime soon.
In Norway, we've got a place called Hell; you pass through it on the way from the town of Trondheim to its airport.
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.
The sign at Hell train station says "Hell Gods-expedition" (which is a slightly old Norwegian spelling meaning something like "Hell - Goods reception").
Hell is also the word for a blonde beer and there is a beer named like this after the town:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucking_Hell
There was also the case of a guy with the last name Hell (which means "bright" in German). He wanted to be part of a church in the US and they denied him
At least the Finns are routinely turning this to their advantage. When there is an international (tech) conference in Helsinki, those flying in to the capital may be greeted with a sponsored banner:
Welcome to HEL
I feel like the worst has to be Bastardstown, Ireland.
The main spoken language in Ireland is English and the construction of the name strongly implies it was not an etymological accident.
In a fierce competition with Scunthorpe.
There's a town in Denmark called Middelfart ...
Never thought of what Middelfart means in english. Now i cannot unsee it.
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I met an indie techno producer who called himself Kura-C which means "penis" in Serbian. He enjoyed learning this fact.
Pula in Croatia, for similar reason famous between Romanians :) (meaning "dick"). Also, Brest in France.
meanwhile in Turkey, Batman can be found.
Turkey has bad city names even in its own language.
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).
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Also in Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Batman#Places_named_after...
Yeah, you know nobody's going to mess with Batman though.
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"They finally grew weary of Fucking, its current name, which some experts say dates back to the 11th century."
"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".
This signpost stealing seems to be a common thing. I know of a town in France called Condom which also suffered this fate a lot.
Maybe Batman, Turkey could help out?
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Also pornhub gave every resident of Fucking a free lifetime premium account. Wonder if they'll revoke it now.
A lot of people don't know this, but it takes about 30min to go from Petting to Fucking. See https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Fucking,+Austria/83367+Petti...
Haha. That's awesome. My nephew thought it was hilarious when he found Fucking on the map. We spent a quite a while joking about taking a Fucking vacation to Fucking Austria to see if they have a Fucking Starbucks where we could hang out with the Fucking people. But once my sister got annoyed I had to tell him to stop joking about the Fucking place and then we started all over. Lmfao.
I guess that's all in the Fucking past now :-(
You need to reverse the directions there.
Apparently some people downvoted you without clicking the link to see that the route is indeed backwards.
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You can do the Wank, Kissing, Petting, Fucking, Wedding tour:
https://youtu.be/BLXe2WTYngQ
Top Gear's fans do know this.
When the road is closed for repairs, people are upset. "No Fugging way."
You and your fucking jokes.
I liked "Austria" better. Oh, there is a comma, never mind.
Should have gone with Hugging for wholesome tourism.
They are austrians, not english.
English are more likely to hug than Austrians?
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So the villagers of "Fucking" got together to pitch ideas for a new village name that couldn't be made fun of, and they settled on... "Fugging"?
Perhaps it's just not a uncommon kind of name in that part of Europe? For example, there's the historically significant and wealthy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugger_family which contains such august names as "Prince Hubertus Fugger von Babenhausen".
It's probably the village's name in the local dialect.
There is also another town called fugging on another part of austria, that used to be spelled fucking but changed name more than a century ago. Language drift seems a reasonable guess.
https://www.vaguelyrudeplacesmap.com/ has a whole collection.
To add confusion Austria will then have two places "Fugging, formerly known as Fucking".
Haha what a surprise, my hometown, Wankum in Germany, is actually on this map
Does that mean their beer, "Fucking Hell" [0] will have to rebrand?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucking_Hell
Fugging Heck
That just reads like they wanted the name and came up with a story to fit. The village and the brewery aren’t even in the same country...
Well, that's unfortunate that they decided to change the name. But there's always Intercourse, PA if you're looking for a fun sounding place to go: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Intercourse,+PA/@40.036806...
And Shitterton in Dorset: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Shitterton,+Bere+Regis,+Wa...
There's a whole map of Vaguely Rude Place Names!
https://www.vaguelyrudeplacesmap.com/
Don't forget Boring (Oregon), sister city of Dull (Scotland).
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For those who love animals there's always the Royal Dick in Edinburgh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_(Dick)_School_of_Veterin...
Y’all are going to Hell, MI
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Keep in mind you can also visit “Blue Balls” and “Paradise” PA which are both close by.
Blue BaLL
Bird-in-hand gets you pretty close to Paradise, but not as nice as Intercourse.
A lot of town names in that area are like this for some probably not-perverse reason.
When I was about 8 in southwestern PA, we took a trip to central PA to visit Gettysburg, the Amish Country, Hershey, and all that. We took a steam train ride that promised a "trip to paradise".
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.
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Some discussion here:
https://www.discoverlancaster.com/blog/wacky-town-names-lanc...
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Released balloons at Easter from church in central Virginia as a kid. Had Easter egg clamped to the string containing a card with return request and address. Got a response a couple weeks later from someone near Intercourse, PA. Of course I found that hilarious but was also amazed at just how far my balloons flew.
Also Kissing, Germany. I live next to it :P
There is also Kissimmee in Florida :)
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And Dildo, in Newfoundland
https://maps.app.goo.gl/vCe2U3ZcK5bTbaDa7
As a Canadian (and Atlantic Canadian) I often see people mention Dildo. But I get an even bigger kick that's Dildo across the harbour from Spread Eagle.
And if you need to relax, there's also the Bong Recreation Area in Wisconsin
Sexbierum, Netherlands: https://goo.gl/maps/d2pWL7UhDfdJiNbAA
See also “Grape Lane”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gropecunt_Lane
Humptulips, WA
They need to twin with Nobby's Beach.
Muff, Donegal, Ireland
The famous spot for Muff Diving?
https://www.muffdivingclub.ie/
Climax, CO.
So, how long will it take for some internet subgroup to use the verb “to fug”? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fug:
*Sound shift from fuck.
Interjection fug
Euphemistic form of fuck. quotations ▲
- 1985, Herbert A. Applebaum, Blue Chips, Brunswick Pub. Co., page 126:
- 2012, Drew Campbell, Dead Letter House, →ISBN:
- 2015, Lynn Lindquist, Secret of the Sevens, →ISBN:
It's already pretty popular in what I'd call loosely 4chan-adjacent meme culture.
https://www.google.com/search?q=spurdo+fug
:DD
Big G tracks you–we are different
People use it all the time along with the Spurdo meme and ":D"
There's more to this: Apparently there's another village in Lower Austria (east of this one which is in Upper Austria) which also used to be called Fucking but was renamed to Fugging a long time ago. Then Fucking, Upper Austria attempted to change its name to Fugging but failed because of the name clash with Fugging, Lower Austria. Incidentally they have their name from the same source as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging_(Lower_Austria)
I totally understand the Fuckers for doing this.
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.
Theyre called Fuckingers
It's also possible to start at Kissing (200km away)
200km is way too long between events :)
Why do people believe there are bad words?
It's less about being a "bad word" per se.
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.
Well, "bad words" may be vulgarities, profanities, or obscenities. As a layman I would say it's not the word itself but the concept which crosses some moral boundary.
That is the question after all. Why the activity/concept described by the word is considered crossing moral boundary. Moral boundary of who?
I suppose the silver lining is that swearing retains its potency as long as people find it offensive. In a sociopolitical sense, the n-word (evidence in itself right there) is the only one with any real weight attached to it any more.
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.
For the same reason people believe there are words in the first place - social convention.
There are vibrations of the air, sometimes people respond to those.
Do you think this village's problem would be significantly different if they were named "Coitus" instead?
Why are there irrational numbers? Why so many, why so different? Are rationals not enough?
> Why are there irrational numbers?
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.
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Q: Why do people believe there are bad words?
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
I wonder if they will keep making this glorious beer:
https://www.bierlinie-shop.de/a-640
They clearly also had some fun with the name
Spurdo’s influence is universal
I knew I couldn't be the only one who thought the new name was much funnier than the old one!
I would have gone with Fraking
I do believe you need the second `k`, ie “Frakking”.
Maybe it's a weird sex thing involving Jonathan Frakes.
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So say we all
given a neighboring village is named "Franking" that sounds like a bad idea :)
So say we all.
Great, now its going to fuel Spurdo memes instead.
A town near me is called "Licking". I've long thought that the only worse name would be "Sucking".
https://imgur.com/RiLpGY7
Boooyi, that was my imgur submission back in 2014 :)
Don’t forget these guys, I’ve been to both -
https://goo.gl/maps/tyDE578TkHtShaPp6
https://goo.gl/maps/anpHReZbbHGgNtki6
What a coincidence lol. I just randomly read the wiki page about this city yesterday. And now this. Wow.
I misread the title as "Australia" and I was only slightly surprised and kind of impressed.
Australia has plenty of fun place names too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tittybong,_Victoria
Nothing compares to Burrumbuttock.
Fun story. There are currently 69 comments, im ruining that.
Hopefully Fuckerberg, Austria never changes.
Soon someone will write graffiti under the current signpost:
"Sometime in the past, we were actually Fucking"
Not sure this is an improvement.
The Fuggers were famous - perhaps even infamous - bankers.
Similar story:
"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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Taekwondo
Also in Sweden the university hospital of Karolinska Institute had to drop the domain kus.se and go with karolinska.se as they got too many visitors from other countries. In Danish and other languages kusse means vagina. https://www.svd.se/karolinska-overger-dyrkopt-webbadress (in Swedish) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karolinska_Institute
Why do they need both a WTF (World Taekwondo) and a FIT (Internatinal Taekwondo Federation)?
Well, at least nobody will mix up Austria and Australia anymore.
Imagine how the settlers on Uranus are going to feel.
To paraphrase Tallulah Bankhead, so this is the village that can't spell "fuck".
Too bad Tuli Kupferberg isn't around to see it.
Damn, no more Fucking.
Fugg.
Fugg!
Fugg me. Fugg you. This is fugged. You fugger. WTF.
Yes, it will suffice.
Fugging idiots. It's like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs because she quacks too much.
Is it so hard to comprehend that maybe living in a nice Austrian village can be better without a golden egg-laying goose that is a huge nuisance? Not everyone is an entrepreneur who wants to make sacrifices in the holy name of $$$.
I know, I agree 100% (I was being a bit provocative on purpose :p ).
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.
So sad.
Let's hope they change it back once they notice the acute loss in revenue from tourism.
ahahaha that's not better!
quick trip to Urbandictionary.com folks
Ah, Urban Dictionary, where you can search for any random word and it will have a sexual definition somewhere.
Use the upvotes and downvotes as a guide
Its worked accurately enough for decades to share a regional context
Not better
I wonder if the residents will continue to get free [0] Pornhub Premium?
[0]: https://www.pornhub.com/premiumplaces
(Note: SFW webpage, but still on the PH domain)
Seems they fugged up there!
HN will shadowbann all swear words. Becarefull
Benis
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/175/637/16d...
This is clearly intentional.
Places do indeed rarely officially change their name by accident.
Considering you cannot educate English speaking idiots, make a living out of them:
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.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=HynsTvRVLiI
They don’t want the hassle of doing this stuff. I guess they just want to be left alone.
> It's what New Zealand's president did
We have a Prime Minister.