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Comment by throw0101a | Hacker News Reader

Etymology:

> The problem was named after an incident in 1996 in which AOL's profanity filter prevented residents of the town of Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, England, from creating accounts with AOL, because the town's name contains the substring "cunt".[1] In the early 2000s, Google's opt-in SafeSearch filters made the same error, preventing people from searching for local businesses or URLs that included Scunthorpe in their names.[2]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

Also, grawlix:

> Grawlixes (#, $, , @): typographical symbols standing in for profanities, appearing in dialogue balloons in place of actual dialogue.[2]*

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexicon_of_Comicana

* https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/grawlix-symbol...

* https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/10/the-grawlix-how-the...

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The residents of Dildo, Newfoundland have embraced the name, you can buy t-shirts that say Dildo and visit the historic Dildo museum

https://www.newfoundlandlabrador.com/plan-and-book/attractio...

On the other hand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria):

“Fugging (German: [ˈfʊkɪŋ] (listen)), named Fucking until 2021, is an Austrian village in the municipality of Tarsdorf, located in the Innviertel region of western Upper Austria. The village is 33 km (21 mi) north of Salzburg and 4 km (2.5 mi) east of the Inn river, which forms part of the German border.

Despite having a population of only 106 in 2020, the village has drawn attention in the English-speaking world for its former name, which was spelled the same as an inflected form of the vulgar English-language word "fuck". Its road signs were a popular visitor attraction and were often stolen by souvenir-hunting vandals until 2005 when they were modified to be theft-resistant. The name change to Fugging, which is pronounced the same in the local dialect, was rejected in 2004 but passed in late 2020.”

In the UK, there is also:

    Brown Willy, Cornwall.
    Cock Alley, Calow.
    Shitterton, Dorset.
    Fanny Barks, Durham.
    Fingringhoe, Essex.
    Bitchfield, Lincolnshire.
    Moisty Lane, Staffordshire.
    Shitlingthorpe, Yorkshire.

The residents of Shitterton now have an almost theft-proof sign.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shitterton

Also Slutshole, Kent

There also used to be much more explicit street names until they were sanitised

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gropecunt_Lane

> The residents of Shitterton now have an almost theft-proof sign

Having grown up on Cock Street, I can confirm that they went to great lengths to make the sign theft-proof.

They often nearly succeeded.

I am perhaps extraordinarily law-abiding, but now a distressingly large part of me wants to heist that sign

I lived in Fingeringhoe. I was an adult before someone pointed out how smutty the name was.

The principle of the local primary school told us that the older name was “fingeringahoe” which if anything was worse!

There's also Cockermouth, in Cumbria.

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