> 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.
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.
Locals don't speak a phonetically hard 'k' in the middle when refering to that village. If you heard them say the name, you'd not be sure whether to write it with gg or ck in the middle.
(NB: I live in a village essentially next to Fucking)
This. I live in southern Germany (swabia) and many village names kind of have a 'standard german' spelling and a local pronunciation. I feel like Fugging might just be a change that reflects a more austrian pronunciation in the spelling.
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.
Regardless, there are many idiomatic phrases that treat pigs as undesirable, e.g., "you filthy pig", "I'm sweating like a pig", "you've made a right pig's ear of that" etc.
While your campaign to restore the dignity of the pig is admirable, I'm not sure it's going to catch on
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 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.
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.
It seems the story I was told about the town of Intercourse at least has some merit.
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.
Dull seems quite proud of their relationship with Boring - they have a sign on the nearest main road proclaiming the relationship which always causes me to smile when I drive past.
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.
I'm from Georgia and have been to that area. Locals don't pronounce it like "kissy me." They pronounce it like "kih simmy." The Sims is not a suggestive phrase and Kissimmee is pronounced more like that than like Kiss Me.
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:
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.
> I think it’s more that it’s a fairly useless correction which makes no real difference.
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.
Something that's often not taken into account on Google Maps, but important particularly for cyclists and heavy vehicles, is incline, which can be very different depending on which way you're going.
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.
"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.
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.
Perhaps that solves the financial part, but it doesn't solve the part where people who speak some other language are sexualizing the name of their town which apparently wasn't named that way to make some kind of sexual statement.
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.
Rape is a highly traumatic event. Getting offended at a foreigner’s well-meaning amusement that your town name means something funny in their language... doesn’t elicit much sympathy from me at all.
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.
So if your five year old child has a good view of this sign from their window at home in a tiny village or walks past it regularly on their way home from school and is thereby exposed to random strangers from across the globe pretending to have sex while taking photos, you are supposed to care more that random people on the internet feel you have no right to be incensed and change the name than about the negative impacts to the people of the village where you live?
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.
I noted that it sounded like an attractive nuisance. I failed to list all the ways in which it was an attractive nuisance and only focused on the part where it's obviously costing a small town money.
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.
I think you made your wrong turn when you equated this to the heinous crime of rape.
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.
What's the "equivalent" of repeatedly ripping their sign out of the ground and stealing it?
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.
> What's the "equivalent" of repeatedly ripping their sign out of the ground and stealing it?
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.
I'm not living there but I would guess that profiteering off the name is seen with contempt as it approves of the meaning. At least for older people. Tbh, your suggestion to cash in on that silly phenomena wouldnt make it stop. Not everything that can be profitable needs to be done :-)
Well, it'd stop the vandalism and town theft, the originally defined issue: Free publicity that leads to sign posts being stolen. For a tiny village of 100 people, this is likely a serious hardship.
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.
Exactly this, the people from Austria and southern Germany don't find that name offensive at all. They've had enough. And now they exert their right to be left alone and not be harassed by a serious number of english speaking idiots. Places ending in -ing hasnt the same grammatical meaning like doing something, that scheme is really common (Mering, Kissing, Manching, Piding, Peiting, and hundreds more). It's the same idiots that beleaguer known instagram photo spots - just a worse kind. And only for some quick silly joke that humiliates the people there. This will hopefully stop the influx of assholes stealing the village's signpost, "insta posing" at the village sign and making prank calls. Also note that normal people live there, probably in a closer knit arrangement than you normally would assume (3 digit inhabitants). I'm rather sure that persons who profit off the infamous name are looked down to (eg. the silly "Fucking Hell" beer brand, "hell" meaning light in that case in german). Dont forget it's normal people living over there, Doctors, Engineers, Farmers - and they want to be treated that way :)
Austrian here. I don't think they have much of a problem with the sexual aspect of the name, but while it may be funny initially, the joke really gets old after years and years of prank calls. I guess they just have had enough.
I’m not objecting to them changing their name, they can do whatever they want with their own town. I’m objecting to the idea that it’s somehow immoral for foreigners to find something about your town amusing.
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.
Although one theory of the origin of the name is the German word for light or bright, most people these days don't find the word Hell particularly offensive and it's not sexually explicit. Fuck or Fucking is still considered "extremely offensive" by some people and it's sexual.
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.
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.
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)
"Merchandizing, where the real money from the movie is made."
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.
Probably they are not interested in this bad humor and selling hoodies. Also not everything in life is counted in dollars, selling a hoodie with a rapey joke? You think they need that.
That's not even funny. Maybe "My sister/friend/whomever went to Austria and I all I got was this Fucking t-shirt" would be sort of funny.
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!"
I don't know anything about beer, but I've spent a minute looking this up before, so here's a surprise German lesson:
‘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.
Thank you for that. I knew I was on shaky ground with the translation. I know nothing about beer and my German is rusty and I didn't do a lot of digging before posting.
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.
> The German translation for that kind of ‘light‘ (as in ‘light beer‘) would be ‘leicht‘
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).
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?
The second part of my comment was in the same spirit as well - how about we admire this peculiar linguistic artifact, embrace and enjoy it rather than optimize everything like robots. Europe especially is completely bent over preserving old cultural architecture and artifacts - what's wrong with wanting to preserve _new_ architecture and artifacts?
Join now the club where "opportunity" is more valuable than "freedom"! (hey, it might be an evolutionary trait, but I suck at surviving and I'm ok with it)
> 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 live about 5km away from Fucking.
Their signs are _regularly_ stolen, even despite their countermeasures.
They even stopped replacing way signs ( | Fucking > ) that were stolen.
While the demographics stealing the sign might not totally overlap with those willing to pay to it, the village should consider opening a souvenir shop.
Almost seems like a privacy hack, living in a place that direction signs cannot point to. Makes me wonder if they were ever close to getting blanked out on Apple maps.
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?
That’s nonsensical. Because the town’s name is mildly meme worthy, these people are forfeiting their right to privacy? Sorry, what? And how is Facebook even remotely related to this discussion?
I think you're mistreading the parent comment. And oddly too, because you do the same thing. You don't mean "these people are forfeiting their right to privacy" literally, do you? it's the opposite. Neither does the parent, it's a question, implied that the answer is "of course not!"
You made that even clearer with "Sorry, what?" but parent comment only make sense if that addendum is assumed.
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.
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.
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".
260 comments
[ 11.5 ms ] story [ 649 ms ] threadWeird (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"...
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.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-joy-of-pigs-smart-clean-...
While your campaign to restore the dignity of the pig is admirable, I'm not sure it's going to catch on
My personal favourite is the small Devon village of Toller Porcorum, which has historically also been called "Swines Toller" and "Hog Toller".
[0]: https://www.pornhub.com/premiumplaces
(Note: SFW webpage, but still on the PH domain)
https://maps.app.goo.gl/vCe2U3ZcK5bTbaDa7
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...
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.
German (specifically derived from the Palatine German dialect), not Dutch (the Germanic language of the Netherlands.)
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.
https://www.vaguelyrudeplacesmap.com/
Kill, Ireland
Time, IL, USA
https://www.muffdivingclub.ie/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gropecunt_Lane
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...
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.
https://osceolahistory.org/history-of-kissimmee/
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.
I guess that's all in the Fucking past now :-(
https://youtu.be/BLXe2WTYngQ
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucking_Hell
To add confusion Austria will then have two places "Fugging, formerly known as Fucking".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tittybong,_Victoria
quick trip to Urbandictionary.com folks
Its worked accurately enough for decades to share a regional context
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PS: The pronunciation will not change.
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.
Presumably the same way Hell, Michigan did. Apparently they sell souvenirs and hold events.
How many people are going to hold an event in Fugging specifically because the name means a sexual act in a different language?
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.
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)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucking_Hell
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!"
"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.
Hell is the German word for light.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25225292
‘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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_lager#Helles
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.
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...
Edit: quite - quiet
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.
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
It's bizarre.
You made that even clearer with "Sorry, what?" but parent comment only make sense if that addendum is assumed.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging_(Lower_Austria)
Hopefully Fuckerberg, Austria never changes.
https://goo.gl/maps/tyDE578TkHtShaPp6
https://goo.gl/maps/anpHReZbbHGgNtki6