Laughing at Johnny Foreigner

It turns out that this sort of thing cuts both ways. I had a good laugh at French breakfast cereals when I was skiing the other week.

Yes, that’s right kids: Hard drugs make for the breakfast of champions. So help yourself to as much smack & crack as you want!

Anyway, if you don’t live in the UK, then I’m technically a foreigner as far as you’re concerned. Which is good, because it means you can notice all of the sort of things that just pass me by as just another part of the way it is here.

I was particularly impressed when Da Square Wheel Man over at the Bicycle Diaries devoted a whole post to English place names. Names like . . .

  • East Breast
  • Titty Ho
  • Spanker Lane
  • Crotch Crescent
  • Crapstone
  • London

That last one doesn’t seem particularly rude though - wonder why it’s on the map?

I’d like to add one more to the list - a village a few miles north of here: Shilbottle. Nothing particularly snigger-worthy about that you might think. Except some wag keeps crossing the ‘l’ on all the road signs to give it an entirely different name.

Anyone out there got local names to rival those on the list?

Filed under: 'A'-List Blogs, Silly Stuff

4 Responses to “ Laughing at Johnny Foreigner ”

  1. Bill on January 25, 2009 at 5:31 pm

    Hehe.

    In Japan it’s affectionately known as “Engrish”. There were many, many times that we were stopped in our tracks on the street as someone walked by with a t-shirt that said something either completely nonsensical.

    In this part of the US, there are a few names that come to mind:

    - French Lick
    - Toad Lick
    - “Tater Peeler Road” in Lebanon, TN

    Around here, just listening to some of the folks talk is funny enough.

  2. Andy in Germany on January 26, 2009 at 9:33 am

    I’ve come across ‘Engrish’ in Japan too, but then my wife telly me a lot of ‘Japanese’ or ‘Feng shui’ is random Japanese letters, sometimes backwards or upside down.

    I recently found ‘Speed’ on sale at the local Aldi Only €-.59 a packet too…

  3. Carlton Reid on January 26, 2009 at 10:43 am

    Good list of rude placenames. They were all in a long newspaper piece last year. The Independent on Sunday, I think. Journalist interviewed residents of a ’sh*t’ place, one the council were trying to censor.

    I like cycle-specific ones, too. How about Click ‘Em In of Ponteland?

  4. BAW on January 26, 2009 at 7:54 pm

    Well, there’s Big Bottom and Big Ugly in WV. (Jay Leno, the American comic, once made hay of a headline: Big Ugly Woman Shot.) There’s a Toad Suck, AR.

    In Austria there’s a town called F*cking. In German its pronounced with a long U; in English, of course, with a short U.