The world's rudest place names

A London man has gone to a lot of trouble to compile a list of the rudest place names in the world.  The Telegraph reports:

Most of us have heard of Titicaca, the high-altitude lake that straddles Peru and Bolivia, and the prominent Breton port of Brest.

But how many people knew about the Philippine town of Anus, the Cambridgeshire hamlet called Six Mile Bottom, or the Indonesian settlement of Semen?

Now, thanks to the meticulous research of Londoner Gary Gale – a “geo-technologist and self professed geek with a life” – all the world’s most amusingly puerile place names can be found on one giggle-inducing website.

Mr Gale’s creation – “Vaguely Rude Place Names of the World” – contains hundreds of ludicrously immature road, town and village names, all plotted on an eye-catching map.

. . .

Across the Atlantic, there’s Hooker in Oklahoma, Climax in Colorado, and Mianus in Connecticut – which featured in one particularly adolescent sketch in Jackass: the Movie.

There's more at the link.

I note that Mr. Gale hasn't recorded on his map one of the funnier stories from colonial times.  It's alleged that during World War II, a British officer was setting up training airfields in what was then Southern Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe) as part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.  Two sites for airfields had been identified, and as part of the process of setting them up, he was asked what they should be named.  Swamped with other work as he was, he didn't have time to waste on such minor matters, and is alleged to have snapped irritably, "You can call one of 'em 'me arse' and the other one 'me elbow', for all I care!"

Reportedly, they did just that.  Some ingenious colonial adapted the local African language to the officer's English colloquialisms.  One airfield was duly (and informally) christened Miyasi, while the other was dubbed Miyelbo!



Peter