Skip to main content

What's in a name?

I don't quite know why my infantile funny bone so enjoyed the debate over a place name in Yorkshire. Perhaps it is because I have been watching videos of Open All Hours, and could imagine the reverend tones with which the debate over Tickle Cock Bridge must have been conducted.

It took me back to my childhood, when we might find names like Christmas Pie amusing and names like Wyre Piddle laugh-out-loud hilarious. Indeed we would take a detour to go through it.

There are, after all a plethora of amusing names across Britain, from Middle Wallop, to Lower Slaughter to the Paps of Jura (though why there are three of those, and only one Pap of Glencoe has always puzzled me). From Muckle Flugga to Mousehole, the UK is filled with the bizarre, the odd and the downright filthy. Indeed the whole world- from Arsoli in Italy to Wankie in Zimbabwe- is your oyster when it comes to place name filth.

Of course street names too have their fair share of the curious, and Tickle Cock Bridge is only the latest in a long line of -shall we say allusive- street names. It is a fair bet that any Maiden Lane in the Kingdom once had a riper moniker- but Grape Lane in York is probably my favourite.

Imagine trying to give Gropecunt Lane as your address these days.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...

The Will of the People

Many of the most criminal political minds of the past generations have claimed to be an expression of the "will of the people"... The will of the people, that is, as interpreted by themselves. Most authoritarian rulers: Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, have called referendums in order to claim some spurious popular support for the actions they had already determined upon. The problem with the June 2016 European Union was that the question was actually insufficiently clear. To leave the EU was actually a vast set of choices, not one specific choice. Danial Hannan, once of faces of Vote Leave was quite clear that leaving the EU did NOT mean leaving the Single Market:    “There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave.” He declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” The problem was that this relatively moderate position was almost immediately ...

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...