A wholly glorious story in this morning’s Svenska Dagbladet. Eleven villagers from the hitherto unremarked settlement of Fjuckby, north of Uppsala, have written to the government petitioning for it to change its name to something less reminiscent of “sex-related activities between humans and even animals”
The journalist wonders what will happen if they succeed: what about the inhabitants of “Bögholmen” (Bugger’s Island), “Brittas Hål” (Britta’s Hole) and “Snålkuk” (Stingy Cock). Can’t they, too, complain that their names provoke “mirth, derision, and ridicule” among strangers, as the eleven upright men of Fjuckby have done?
What is remarkable, of course, is that the story shows the spread of English, at least a sort of English, into the remoter recesses of the Swedish countryside.
(Nyaaah — he said “countryside”)
The site where I read this story included a comment that the problem was bilingual, the villagers were equally concerned about the Swedish verb ‘juck’. This lead me to thoughts about the African-American word ‘juke’ (as in ‘juke box’) which means or meant ‘f…’, and the Jamaican and Sranantongo word ‘jook’ meaning ‘pierce’ (‘macca jook me!’= ‘I’ve been pricked by a thorn’).
…and Scunthorpe. Let’s not forget Scunthorpe!