Weird (to me, an english speaker with no knowledge of modern or 11th century Austrian) that they went with Fugging and not, say, Focking.
[0]: https://www.pornhub.com/premiumplaces
(Note: SFW webpage, but still on the PH domain)
A lot of town names in that area are like this for some probably not-perverse reason.
To add confusion Austria will then have two places "Fugging, formerly known as Fucking".
All the time, they would have had people scraping away some paint turning the "o" into a "u"...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I doubt the thrill of theft is a significant driver of it.
Presumably the same way Hell, Michigan did. Apparently they sell souvenirs and hold events.
I'm for the decriminalization of sex work, but I also think that needs to be something someone chooses and is not compelled to do. The very definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent, which is why we can distinguish between kink and rape: People can consent to BDSM. The definition of rape does not hinge on the detail of whether or not it is physically aggressive or even violent.
If their primary issue is that it is an affront to their sense of dignity, making money off of it doesn't fix the issue. That's a bit like saying "If you give a few bucks to the woman you raped, it's somehow okay now that she didn't want to have sex with you."
She's highly unlikely to feel like giving her money afterwards somehow makes it okay to assault her.
How many people are going to hold an event in Fugging specifically because the name means a sexual act in a different language?
Prank phone calls are definitely more annoying than some tourists taking a picture at the town sign.
Now getting your signs stolen isn’t very nice at all and becomes less well-meaning, I agree. But I hardly think the joke itself is anything immoral at all.
I cannot fathom why so many people are objecting to their right to change the name of their village. They don't like what's happening. They don't need the world's permission to say "I can't stop assholes from around the globe from being assholes, but I can change the damn name that is their excuse for acting like butts to my town." and now people think it's the townspeople who are in the wrong and not the random assholes from across the globe whose bad behavior they got fed up with.
Wow.
I think I need to get off of HN for a bit. This is just ridiculous.
But more to the point, if people in Hell, Michigan choose to monetize the name of their town instead of change it, hey, that's their choice and it should in no way dictate what people in Austria choose to do about the problem they currently have with the issues caused by the name of their town.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell,_Michigan
I don't know why people in this discussion feel like their solution or suggestion is more correct than what locals decided they wished to do about the problem. It's not like their solution involved sacrificing babies to a dark god.
Its worked accurately enough for decades to share a regional context
Hopefully Fuckerberg, Austria never changes.
So yes, this argument is ridiculous.
Then HN pedantry and argumentation kicked in.
The townspeople clearly see it as an attractive nuisance and not as free publicity. They chose to change the name because it's such a nuisance. Now a bunch of people on HN feel the townspeople were wrong to handle it that way and have a zillion criticisms and solutions.
The townspeople didn't ask HNs permission or opinion. And a lot of the comments here before I noted that it's an attractive nuisance were basically junior high style humor listing all the towns with "bad word" names and giggling about it -- which I initially participated in and then deleted those comments to try to behave in accordance with HN rules and treat the article in a more serious fashion, at which point I made my comment about it being an attractive nuisance.
And that's apparently where I made my wrong turn for the day. And there is no cure for where that took me, it seems.
PS: The pronunciation will not change.
You can't assume all roads are two-way/full duplex. It is possible (not sure how frequent) that going from A to B takes considerably longer than going from B to A.
And yeah, maybe don’t be so prudish. Children seeing random strangers shaking their hips isn’t the end of the world. I personally find that ridiculous. But probably a little bit less ridiculous still than your initial comparison of this to rape of all things.
> I think I need to get off of HN for a bit.
Goodbye.
I recently passed through the town of Weed, California and bought a tie-dye hoodie from a gas station with the town name on it. Didn't need the hoodie, but they sold them so I bought one for the novelty. Voilà! Business angle.In Swedish, the word for cross is Kors. I know it's not a Swedish town name, but a lot of Swedish words are the same or similar throughout other Germanic languages. In this case, it is namely Dutch, which has a direct connection to the area due to the Amish people there.
Anyway, I was told that the town name literally referenced two inter-crossing roads, and Kors was, instead of being anglicized to Cross, became Course.
"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."
German (specifically derived from the Palatine German dialect), not Dutch (the Germanic language of the Netherlands.)
"Sometime in the past, we were actually Fucking"
‘Hell‘ means bright. Sometimes, ‘light‘ is the correct translation (e.g. light blue is ‘hellblau‘ in German). But in this context, it means pale, as in pale lager[0]. Nothing to do with reduced alcohol content or calories. The German translation for that kind of ‘light‘ (as in ‘light beer‘) would be ‘leicht‘ (lightweight) or ‘light‘ (as a loanword from English).
Also, it's not ‘our town name‘; it's ‘their town name‘. Fucking Hell isn't made in Fucking; it's not even from Austria.
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
Too bad Tuli Kupferberg isn't around to see it.
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.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-joy-of-pigs-smart-clean-...
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.
My main point stands: It doesn't mean "fucking hell" in German.
Kind of like that song "What does the fox say?" The two brothers didn't expect it to be so successful. In fact, they intended it to be a joke on some TV show they were doing or something like that. They were planning ahead of time to be all "We got our big break and this is the garbage we produced!"
I talked to an American who was sure that it was intended to be a play on words. She heard it as "What the fucks?" and she figured that's why it was so popular.
That may well be part of why it took off -- because it's something for English speakers to snicker about -- but I kind of doubt it was originally planned that way. People who speak English as a second language -- or anything as a second language -- routinely say "bad" things without intending it or even realizing it.
So someone may be doing it ("it" being naming the beer something naughty to the English speaking ear) on purpose because it's funny to people who speak English. But this isn't a case of "laughing with you." It's very much a case of "laughing at you" and the people being laughed at aren't enjoying it and they decided to put a stop to it wrt their town name.
And I feel like I'm getting a lot of hostility for being on the side of the villagers who feel mistreated and don't want to put up with it anymore. And it's an icky thing to be feeling right now and to be observing how this went down overall.
I guess that's all in the Fucking past now :-(
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dildo,_Newfoundland_and_Labr... (There is also South Dildo..just below Dildo)
Condom in France: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condom,_Gers
Intercourse in PA, USA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercourse,_Pennsylvania
Hooker, OK. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooker,_Oklahoma
ETA: what do you know..there is more https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-03-24/wait-youre-where-11-t...
Edit: quite - quiet
I checked a few videos claiming to cover the pronunciation and the first two said it more like "kissy me." But this one has the pronunciation I'm familiar with:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu-Kq-2irQE
Edit:
The name Kissimmee can be traced back to the language of the Jororo people and means “long water.” There were approximately 350,000 people living in Florida when the Spanish arrived in 1513.
While your campaign to restore the dignity of the pig is admirable, I'm not sure it's going to catch on
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.
It's bizarre.
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.
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.
But "She went to fucking and all I got was this fucking t-shirt" isn't really a good joke. There's no surprise element. There's no "gotcha." There's no epiphany of "Oh, I get it!"
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.
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).
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.
It can be used that way, but it's not the only meaning: Leicht und stark also refer to a beer's gravity[1] instead of its alcohol content per se. A Starkbier in particular is a beer with 16° on the Plato scale[2] (which does go along with more alcohol, so in a way this distinction is splitting hairs).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_(alcoholic_beverage)
[2] http://8degreesplato.com/2017/05/31/so-what-is-degrees-plato...
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 Fuggers were famous - perhaps even infamous - bankers.
My personal favourite is the small Devon village of Toller Porcorum, which has historically also been called "Swines Toller" and "Hog Toller".
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).
*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.bierlinie-shop.de/a-640
They clearly also had some fun with the name
The main spoken language in Ireland is English and the construction of the name strongly implies it was not an etymological accident.
Welcome to HEL
"My Parents really liked Fucking but all they got was this Fucking T-shirt".
Let's make it a bit darker...
"My Brother and Sister really liked Fucking but all they got was Me" T-Shirt.
The brewery might lose some business long term, but for now they surely benefit from another lap in the news machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucking_Hell
https://www.google.com/search?q=spurdo+fug
:DD
Unfortunately they were a bit late with that, the beer that uses the village as it's namesake, Fucking Hell, is from a business a few miles over the border in Germany. (they surely won't rebrand though)
"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".
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"
You made that even clearer with "Sorry, what?" but parent comment only make sense if that addendum is assumed.
Jewsons, a builders merchant in the UK did a brilliant take on this in one of their adverts.
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 it surprises me to discover that the language is connected to Germanic Switzerland.
As much as Kors was seemingly mistranslated to course instead of cross, Deitsch was apparently mistranslated into the word Dutch instead of German.
And people make fun of the Scandinavian quirks in Minnesota. Uff da!
Thanks for the correction. This error-prone history would make for a great YouTube documentary.
You are no doubt correct, which is aggravating to me for a long list of reasons.
From the article:
Increasing numbers of English-speaking tourists have made a point of stopping in to snap pictures of themselves by the signpost at the entrance to the village, sometimes striking lascivious poses for social media.
The word is not a sexual word in German. It is in English. This is being forced on the village without their consent and it is leading to sexualized behavior without their consent.
When one man does that to one woman, we define it as rape. When a bunch of tourists do that to a town, we point and laugh and act like the town is overreacting and doesn't have a sense of humor.
Over the years, I have tried to think of another example of something where we make this distinction that if we agree to it, it's a good thing and if we don't then it's a bad thing. Rape vs "making love" is the only one I know where we make that distinction and the legal distinction hinges on the detail of consent.
There was a case where a man and woman were getting divorced and she accused him of rape and there was film of the incident because violent sex was her kink. He was found innocent. Violent sex with consent is kink or BDSM, not rape. Rape is about lack of consent, not about the degree of violence.
Rape is not always as clear cut as people would like to imagine. It's really common for women to feel confused about whether or not what happened to them was really rape, in part because people imagine that rape is some kind of violent assault and not simply the detail of lack of clear consent.
The legal definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent and this town is having a sexualized thing forced upon them without their consent. It's unfortunate that people feel I am somehow "escalating" this to a much more terrible thing than it is rather than seeing my remarks as clarifying part of why this is so extremely objectionable to the townspeople.
The equivalent of these no-contact actions gets called sexual harassment, not rape.
These people feel violated. I've seen people on HN used the word rape to describe how they feel about something done to them against their will by, say, Facebook.
It gets used metaphorically that way routinely because we don't really have another good word for "I feel egregiously violated because of something someone did to me without my consent or against my will." We use it that way without it involving physical contact.
I thought you were talking about the sexual acts.
Stealing the sign is just theft. The equivalent is also theft.
> I've seen people on HN used the word rape to describe how they feel about something done to them against their will by, say, Facebook.
Yes, but they will readily admit that it is hyperbole, not what they actually think about the act. If they treat it as a serious comparison, that will get strongly argued against.
You are saying that the actual definition of rape is fitting here, which is in a different ballpark from hyperbole.
But more notably, it's a way of moving the problem into a more concretely defined space, ideally out of sight and out of mind (and the money is just a bonus). Such a shop would become like the tourist portion of any large city -- a place locals avoid, and captures most of the visting rabble.
You'll still have your vandals and troublemakers on the street, but hopefully at significantly reduced rates.