UK town bans "Cracknuts Lane" & other streets

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Apparently, all potentially offensive-sounding words for street names are now banned in East Sussex.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1105056/Council-bans-rude-street-names-offend.html

The thread title name sounds like a threat: "Better leave my sister alone, or I'll see you on Cracknuts Lane!"

I vote to ban "Middlesex" county. It's too offensive to the transsexual, as well as to the physically asexual.

I mean, geez, if you take a look at some of the British names for places, it's obvious they are a more intellectually- rather than innuendo-focused people. If you're going to start banning everything that could sound offensive, you won't be left with much.

Then again, there is a town in Austria called, simply, "f*****g". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/f*****g,_Austria
And they refuse to change the name, no matter how many British tourists steal signs bearing the name.

Also, there is a Greek Isle which is chalk full of male heterosexual Lesbians. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbos_Island
They also refuse to change the name, with many of the natives demanding, rather, that the entire rest of the world stop applying the word "lesbian" to gay women.

Think about that the next time you're driving down Cockshut.

Last edited by Ragtime on 05 Jan 2009, 2:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

This kind of thing keeps happening. In Australia they banned "Ho Ho Ho" cause Santa is sexist LOL. Now Santa has to say "Ha Ha Ha" despite the fact that "Ho Ho Ho" has been around long before the slang term for skanks. And in Norway men can't pee standing up cause its "triumphing in their masculinity" And also in Norway (I think it's Norway, maybe Sweden) "history" is banned cause it has the word "his" in it. I wish I was making this stuff up. Everyone is so sensitive these days, it makes me sick.

I might be slightly wrong on some of the details here, but the word "Lesbian" as a reference to female homosexuality comes from the association between the island of Lesbos and the female poet Sappho, who, unless I've got my facts mixed up, is most known for having written numerous love poems about women. However, whether these poems were autobiographical or fictional is obviously uncertain, as this was a very very long time ago. But that's where the term "Lesbian" comes from, I think. And the word "Sapphic".

Freezing over in Hell, Michigan topic

Yep, Dick Hore, Church Sexton, who now lives in Hell, visited F**king Austria and the Virgin Islands and has seen movies like Octopussy and Free Willy at the Cockney Theatre.

Being Swedish, I can say right away that no, history is not banned here. And I don't think it is in Norway either. "His" isn't even a word in Norwegian, as far as I know. And I doubt this stuff is true at all, anywhere. You might not be making this stuff up, but I have a feeling that whoever told it to you was yanking your leg.

Yep.

I did wonder how Norwegians could disallow men from urinating while standing, as that would require some pretty privacy-invasive law enforcement. And who cares about your peeing position when you're in private anyway? Or when you're simply among other men in a public restroom?

I'm gonna go ahead and guess that those were so-called Norway jokes. Swedes make jokes about Norwegians being dumb and Norwegians make jokes about Swedes being dumb, it's a thing. "Norway decided to pass some equality laws. So now it's illegal to pee standing up." sounds exactly like it could be a Norway joke.

I look in my 11 year old London A-Z and there is 27 roads beginning with and including Gay, There is one just two blocks away called Gayville road, the houses there are not bad.

I think it would be pretty impractical to remove all the innuendo from London’s streets. People get offended too easily. Well mostly councillors and the type of people who write into 'points of view' with Terry Wogan. I remember a linguist saying there used to be a c**t street long before that word was in wingspread use.

That is what you get with very old places.

that reminds me of my first ever time on London underground. I was on Picadilly line and there was a screen saying "this train is for Cockfosters". I remember being puzzled and slightly offended

Here in York, PA we have a street called Gay Ave.


And of course you always have a friend in Intercourse, PA.

seriously? changing street names because they offend? that's just pathetic!

i used to live in st. neots, should that be changed as some people are offended by saints or religion?

what about streets with 'hill' in the name? 'hill' isn't offensive but what if people started calling other's 'hills' as an offensive term for those who live on high ground?

where would the line be?

Eh, just look at the grid and give every street a number. No more problems, plenty of numbers to go around. one direction gets even and the other gets odds and the ones running slantwise get decimals or fractions.

Don't want to offend the people on streets that aren't getting renamed. Oh, and they'll have to skip 1, that would mean that someone might feel superior, and probably 13 for luck's sake.

No you have a steert called gay street and an ave. called gay ave. or is that west gay ave/street?

it just occured to me that this is obviously going to cost the government money, money that we can't afford to pay. what the hell is the government thinking?

There is a Gay Way in the Sacramento suburb of North Highlands, an area built in the early 1950s. At the time "gay" meant "happy" in America. Jay Leno once was sent an ad for Gay brand mayonnaise from 1952 for his "dumb headlines" segment on his talk show, and I remember him making fun of it. The slogan said "Get Gay today!" By the way, some areas in the US have lettered and numbered streets, it was usually the easiest way to set up a boomtown, or the areas were platted by the military. Sacramento has a downtown with a letter/number grid system. The Chamber of Commerce boasts that it's the easiest street system to learn in the US. Sacramento was laid out by two mid level Army officers, but it never was a garrison town.

Often in the US, cross streets will be numbered and main streets will be named, with presidents and other historical figures being popular. San Francisco's odd downtown street names come from the Gold Rush, many of those people were merchants and mining superintendents and other prominent early Californians. Many rail towns were laid out with cross streets called West, Center, and East, and four or five numbered streets that had houses on them. Fernley and Pahrump, both in Nevada, come to mind. The original plan for Reno was bordered by West and East streets with a Center street at the halfway point. East Street no longer exists, but the rest of the grid does, albeit with Peavine Street renamed Evans. New York City has numbered streets in Midtown with the cross streets being numbered avenues.