Here’s some brief Friday afternoon humor as we head into the long holiday weekend. There is a town in Austria
that has an unfortunate name. I’m not going to write it here, but the photo and links on this page will clearly
illustrate the word. (Just to be safe, I should caution readers that the links include profanity,
but only to describe the name of this poor place.) Seems that English speaking tourists just can’t get
enough of the “Welcome to _____” signs, forcing city officials to
take extreme measures. They have bolted and welded
road signs to steel posts embedded in concrete to stop the continuous thefts.
So what the F? How did this tiny town get named? According to
Wikipedia, it is named after a man from the 6th
century called Focko. “Ing” is an old Germanic suffix meaning “people”; which forms the lovely ”place of
Focko’s people”, pronounced “fooking”. We all know it’s not nice to steal, and visitors traveling through a quaint town
not far from Salzburg surely have better things to be doing. Shame on them. Yet still I chuckle. Sometimes it’s the
silly things that get me through…
[via The Morning News]