Allophile

Geographical Word-fun. Courtesy of the UK...(and today's IHT.com)

(this is a "reprint" from an article that I found during today's lunch-break.
I couldn't resist...)
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A church at Pratts Bottom, a village in Kent, England. Britain is dotted with ancient place names that, with the passage of time, have become fodder for the snickering classes. ( Hazel Thompson for The New York Times)

Britain's snigger-worthy place names
By Sarah Lyall
Friday, January 23, 2009 http://www.iht.com/

CRAPSTONE, England: When ordering things by telephone, Stewart Pearce tends to take a proactive approach to the inevitable question: "What is your address?"

He lays it out straight, so there is no room for unpleasant confusion. "I say, 'It's spelled 'crap,' as in crap,"' said Pearce, 61, who has lived in Crapstone, a one-shop country village in Dartmoor, for decades.
Disappointingly, Pearce has so far been unable to parlay such delicate encounters into material gain, as a neighbor once did.

"Crapstone," the neighbor said forthrightly, whereupon the person on the other end of the telephone repeated it to his co-workers and burst out laughing. "They said, 'Oh, we thought it didn't really exist,"' Pearce related, "and then they gave him a free something."

In the scale of embarrassing place names, Crapstone ranks pretty high. But Britain is full of them. Some are mostly amusing, like Ugley, Essex; East Breast, in western Scotland; North Piddle, in Worchestershire; and Spanker Lane, in Derbyshire.

Others evoke images that may conflict with the efforts of residents to appear dignified when, for example, opening bank accounts.

These include Crotch Crescent, Oxford; Titty Ho, Northamptonshire; Slutshole Lane, Norfolk; and Thong, Kent. And, in a country that delights in lavatorial humor, particularly if the word "bottom" is involved, there is Pratts Bottom, in Kent, doubly cursed because "prat" is slang for buffoon.

As for Penistone, a thriving South Yorkshire town, just stop that sophomoric snickering.

"It's pronounced 'PENNIS-tone,"' Fiona Moran, manager of the Old Vicarage Hotel in Penistone, said over the telephone, rather sharply. When forced to spell her address for outsiders, she uses misdirection, separating the tricky section into two blameless parts: "p-e-n" - pause - "i-s-t-o-n-e."

Several months ago, Lewes District Council in East Sussex tried to address the problem of inadvertent place-name titillation by saying that "street names which could give offense" would no longer be allowed on new roads.
"Avoid esthetically unsuitable names," like Gaswork Road, the council decreed. Also, avoid "names capable of deliberate misinterpretation," like Hoare Road, Typple Avenue, Quare Street and Corfe Close.

(What is wrong with Corfe Close, you might ask? The guidelines mention the hypothetical residents of No.4, with their unfortunate hypothetical address, "4 Corfe Close.")

The council explained that it was only following guidelines set out by the national government and that it did not intend to change any existing lewd names.

Still, news of the revised policy raised an outcry.

"Sniggering at double entendres is a loved and time-honored tradition in this country," Carol Midgley wrote in The Times of London. Alluding to a slang word for "idiot," she added: "Half the reason for traveling to the Orkney Islands is to get your photo taken next to the road sign for Twatt."

Ed Hurst, a co-author, with Rob Bailey, of "Rude Britain" and "Rude UK," which list arguably offensive place names - some so arguably offensive that, unfortunately, they cannot be printed here - said that many such communities were established hundreds of years ago and that their names were not rude at the time.

"Place names and street names are full of history and culture, and it's only because language has evolved over the centuries that they've wound up sounding rude," Hurst said in an interview.

Bailey, who grew up on Tumbledown Dick Road in Oxfordshire, and Hurst got the idea for the books when they read about a couple who bought a house on Butt Hole Road, in South Yorkshire.

The name most likely has to do with the spot's historic function as a source of water, a water butt being a container for collecting water. But it proved to be prohibitively hilarious.

"If they ordered a pizza, the pizza company wouldn't deliver it, because they thought it was a made-up name," Hurst said. "People would stand in front of the sign, pull down their trousers and take pictures of each other's naked buttocks."

The couple moved away.

The people in Crapstone have not had similar problems, though their sign is periodically stolen by word-loving merrymakers. And their village became a stock joke a few years ago, when a television advertisement featuring the prone-to-swearing soccer player Vinnie Jones showed Jones's car breaking down just under the Crapstone sign.

In the commercial, Jones tries to alert the towing company to his location while covering the sign and trying not to say "crap" in front of his young daughter.

Jacqui Anderson, a doctor in Crapstone who used to live in a village called Horrabridge, which has its own issues, said that she no longer thinks about the "crap" in "Crapstone."

Still, when strangers ask where she's from, she admitted, "I just say I live near Plymouth."