You Live Where?

The Noo Yoik Times has been quite considerate these past fifty years in that it has left me alone to get on with fucking up my life unassisted.
This week, however, it has thrust itself most intrusively into my world and both times it has made me giggle.

First up was of course the sexual survey that - amongst such delights as the plethysmograph - revealed that most women are physically turned on by watching dubbed chimpanzee porn but will not admit to it.

And now the lovely Petrea has pointed me at a delightfully chortlesome Noo Yoik Times article raising a somewhat startled eyebrow at our quaint English place names.

Those fun-loving Colonials have been chuckling into their non-fat vanilla lattes at the prospect of living in such places as Crapstone, Peniston, Ugley (which could only be in Essex), East Breast, North Piddle, Spanker Lane, Crotch Crescent, Butt Hole Road, the splendid Titty Ho and the unfortunate Sluts' Hole Lane.

Sluts' Hole Lane is actually in Attleborough, home to my brother Phil, although he lives at the "nicer" end of the village, where such a place would be euphemistically renamed "Escort Companion's Lady-Parts Lane."

I have great affection for rude historical place names ever since my old mate Babs, up in the Shetland Islands, pointed out a standing stone to me, in front of which a small sign read (in a splendid attempt at the local vernacular) "The White Stane Of Willie."

Old Dive (who lives not far from the village of Six Mile Bottom; surely a place many US citizens would feel at home visiting) has actually posted on this subject before, when pot-holers in Derbyshire confirmed that Britain's biggest cave had been discovered hidden below a fissure known for centuries as the Devil's Arsehole.

The most splendid example of vernacular profanity in English place names is a street I pass along every working day.
For centuries, fragrant ladies have plied their venerable trade there, offering such exotic delights as "penny up the wall" knee-tremblers, as a result of which, the place was officially known by the delightful soubriquet of (brace yourselves) "Gropecunte Lane".

Unfortunately, when the Bank of England was located there, they renamed it Threadneedle Street (still a lingering trace of the old profession in the new name).
I must say that the moral standards of Gropecunte Lane's working population have declined catastrophically since the bank moved in; they are still screwing people and taking their money but the amount of pleasure per penny available there now is nothing like it was in the old days.

The "C" word was of course happily used by Chaucer, Shakespeare and Pepys and has only recently become the great taboo.
It was for many a century merely a jolly and far from offensive euphemism for a lady's furry front-bottom and its diminutive derivative "cunny" was still in everyday use when I was a kid, producing no more shock value (and about an equal amount of sniggering behind the hand) as the word "bum."

Times change and prudery increasingly bowdlerises our lives, which is a great pity as it deprives us of much that was once colourful and richly evocative in our wonderful vernacular history.
Long may such names avoid the censor's shameful attentions.