There are bunches of cities and towns in the world that have questionable names. There are plenty that sound NSFW but really aren’t. There are also the brothers in the U.K. who made a “rude trip” (as opposed to a road trip) to visit towns in Great Britain with the most adult-sounding names.
As someone who used to have a best friend who lived near Intercourse, Pennsylvania, such cities and towns always piqued my interest (plus, c’mon…if you’ve read YMMV for a while, you know I tend to write the more quirky stuff. I mean, really, who else is going to write about a sneaky workaround for using squat toilets, or how to stop a manspreader on a plane in 3 easy steps, right?).
So how I missed that there was a town in Austria called F**king is beyond me.
It’s kind of a moot point though, because after nearly 1,000 years of the town having the name F**king, Mayor Andrea Holzner recently told Austrian broadcaster Oe24 that, effective January 1, 2021, they’re changing the name.
No one had any issues with the town’s name for centuries. After all, “f**king” isn’t a bad word in German. And it’s a tiny town (population 100 or so) on the border of Germany, so it kind of went under the radar of English-speaking tourists for years.
But once the internet became a thing, the town of F**king sort of had a spotlight on it, simply because you can find anything on the internet. So for years, besides the town’s signs frequently being stolen they’ve also had issues with visitors having sex in front of the signs, as well as prank phone calls where people ask, in English, “Is this F**king?” and then hanging up (before then, I guess they asked if their refrigerator was running).
The F**king residents voted in 1996 and 2012 to keep the town’s name status quo. Mayor Holsner refused to go into detail as to why they’ve decided to change the F**king name now, simply saying, “I can confirm that the village is being renamed. I really don’t want to say anything more – we’ve had enough media frenzy about this in the past.”
The town’s new name will be “Fugging,” which is closer to how the locals pronounced F**king anyway.
So much for that 9-hour tour of Kissing, Petting, F**king and Wedding (Note: link is NSFW: adult language. Obviously) in Austria and Germany, I guess. 😉
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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
