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| 刘易斯地方政府要求新起的街名要避免不雅、粗俗的含义 |
英国上下，不雅、难听甚至让人引发各种低俗联想的街名，随处可见。
比如，Grope Lane（“摸摸巷”）、Weeford（“尿尿窝”）、Scratchy Bottom（“挠屁股”）等等。这些特别的街名往往有一定的历史渊源。
现在，英国东萨塞克斯郡（East Sussex）的刘易斯（Lewes）地方政府要向“不雅”街名宣战。
虽然强调不会更改现有街名，但今后新起的街名中，将禁止不雅的名字，比如Gaswork Road（煤气厂路）、Coalpit Lane（煤坑巷）等。
刘易斯地方政府市政规划部门新出台的指导原则还要求新起的街名要避免有冒犯或不雅的含义，避免鼓励人们有意歪曲篡改。
仁者见仁
但是，批评者说，不雅的街名往往有其历史渊源，对街名进行限制筛选，只会导致毫无意义的街名泛滥。
考证一些特殊街名、地名由来的《粗俗英国》（Rude UK）一书的作者之一，贝利（Rob Bailey）认为，如果去掉了一些名字中的“不雅”成分，就割断了与之相联系的独特的工业或地貌背景。
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| 刘易斯地区的街名之一，Juggs Close的意思，据信来自于鱼筐--wrong |
他举例说，在Merseyside 有一个Slag Lane（煤渣巷），就是因为当年那里的煤渣堆而得名。
“屁眼儿”路的居民表示理解
但一些住在有特别名字的街道上的居民的确发现被调侃的实在难以忍受。
阿洛特（Paul and Lisa Allott）一家住在南约克郡一个叫Butt Hole Road（可以被联想成“屁眼儿路”）的街上。
他们家前院的墙边，就是街名标牌。经常有孩子使坏，把光屁股照片钉在路标牌上。
阿洛特夫妇说，有时候叫出租车或是让人送货，司机拒绝出车，因为不相信真有这样的街名，以为是恶作剧。 No Snickering: That Road Sign Means Something Else
The “Butt” in this road, in South Yorkshire, probably refers to a container for collecting water.
CRAPSTONE, England — When ordering things by telephone, Stewart Pearce tends to take a proactive approach to the inevitable question “What is your address?”
Pratts Bottom, a village in Kent, is doubly cursed because “prat” is slang for buffoon.
If you’re smirking at this sign, you’re mispronouncing the town’s name. It’s PENNIS-tun.
He lays it out straight, so there is no room for unpleasant confusion. “I say, ‘It’s spelled “crap,” as in crap,’ ” said Mr. Pearce, 61, who has lived in Crapstone, a one-shop country village in Devon, for decades.
Disappointingly, Mr. Pearce has so far been unable to parlay such delicate encounters into material gain, as a neighbor once did.
“Crapstone,” the neighbor said forthrightly, Mr. Pearce related, whereupon the person on the other end of the telephone repeated it to his co-workers and burst out laughing. “They said, ‘Oh, we thought it didn’t really exist,’ ” Mr. Pearce said, “and then they gave him a free something.”
In the scale of embarrassing place names, Crapstone ranks pretty high. But Britain is full of them. Some are mostly amusing, like Ugley, Essex; East Breast, in western Scotland; North Piddle, in Worcestershire; and Spanker Lane, in Derbyshire.
Others evoke images that may conflict with residents’ efforts to appear dignified when, for example, applying for jobs.
These include Crotch Crescent, Oxford; Titty Ho, Northamptonshire; Wetwang, East Yorkshire; Slutshole Lane, Norfolk; and Thong, Kent. And, in a country that delights in lavatory humor, particularly if the word “bottom” is involved, there is Pratts Bottom, in Kent, doubly cursed because “prat” is slang for buffoon.
As for Penistone, a thriving South Yorkshire town, just stop that sophomoric snickering.
“It’s pronounced ‘PENNIS-tun,’ ” Fiona Moran, manager of the Old Vicarage Hotel in Penistone, said over the telephone, rather sharply. When forced to spell her address for outsiders, she uses misdirection, separating the tricky section into two blameless parts: “p-e-n” — pause — “i-s-t-o-n-e.”
Several months ago, Lewes District Council in East Sussex tried to address the problem of inadvertent place-name titillation by saying that “street names which could give offense” would no longer be allowed on new roads.
“Avoid aesthetically unsuitable names,” like Gaswork Road, the council decreed. Also, avoid “names capable of deliberate misinterpretation,” like Hoare Road, Typple Avenue, Quare Street and Corfe Close.
(What is wrong with Corfe Close, you might ask? The guidelines mention the hypothetical residents of No. 4, with their unfortunate hypothetical address, “4 Corfe Close.” To find the naughty meaning, you have to repeat the first two words rapidly many times, preferably in the presence of your fifth-grade classmates.)
The council explained that it was only following national guidelines and that it did not intend to change any existing lewd names.
Still, news of the revised policy raised an outcry.
“Sniggering at double entendres is a loved and time-honored tradition in this country,” Carol Midgley wrote in The Times of London. Ed Hurst, a co-author, with Rob Bailey, of “Rude Britain” and “Rude UK,” which list arguably offensive place names — some so arguably offensive that, unfortunately, they cannot be printed here — said that many such communities were established hundreds of years ago and that their names were not rude at the time.
“Place names and street names are full of history and culture, and it’s only because language has evolved over the centuries that they’ve wound up sounding rude,” Mr. Hurst said in an interview.
Mr. Bailey, who grew up on Tumbledown Dick Road in Oxfordshire, and Mr. Hurst got the idea for the books when they read about a couple who bought a house on Butt Hole Road, in South Yorkshire.
The name most likely has to do with the spot’s historic function as a source of water, a water butt being a container for collecting water. But it proved to be prohibitively hilarious.
“If they ordered a pizza, the pizza company wouldn’t deliver it, because they thought it was a made-up name,” Mr. Hurst said. “People would stand in front of the sign, pull down their trousers and take pictures of each other’s naked buttocks.”
The couple moved away.
The people in Crapstone have not had similar problems, although their sign is periodically stolen by word-loving merrymakers. And their village became a stock joke a few years ago, when a television ad featuring a prone-to-swearing soccer player named Vinnie Jones showed Mr. Jones’s car breaking down just under the Crapstone sign.
In the commercial, Mr. Jones tries to alert the towing company to his location while covering the sign and trying not to say “crap” in front of his young daughter.
The consensus in the village is that there is a perfectly innocent reason for the name “Crapstone,” though it is unclear what that is. Theories put forth by various residents the other day included “place of the rocks,” “a kind of twisting of the original word,” “something to do with the soil” and “something to do with Sir Francis Drake,” who lived nearby.
Jacqui Anderson, a doctor in Crapstone who used to live in a village called Horrabridge, which has its own issues, said that she no longer thought about the “crap” in “Crapstone.”
Still, when strangers ask where she’s from, she admitted, “I just say I live near Plymouth.”
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