SAUCY PLACE NAMES

SAUCY PLACE NAMES

I have just moved into a geographical area where topographically speaking everything is thongs and bottoms, almost as if I had suddenly strayed into the salacious subconscious of Dubliner Leopold Bloom, hero of the 1922 Ulysses by James Joyce (1882-1941).You will recall that one of Bloom’s favourite pastimes was the furtive and perspiring study of lingerie catalogues, but here in Holmfirth, West Yorkshire (population 8000) you only have to look at an OS map to discern Upper Thong (1200 souls), Nether Thong  (population unknown) and less suggestively Thongsbridge  (another 1200 folk). Not far off is Lower Hagg, which seeing we are talking of the subconscious, chimes with the word ‘hag’, a pejorative term for a supposedly ugly aka sexually unappetising woman of whatever age, though usually old. In actual fact ‘hagg’ is an Old Norse word meaning ‘forest clearing’ and you get it in DH Lawrence novels and along the northern side of the Anglo-Scottish border in the form of woodland farms called Harelaw Hagg etc.

Nether Thong also has the added association of ‘nethers’, a polite and antiquated euphemism for the genitals and the backside. Which brings us conveniently to bottoms, and my new house is at Norridge Bottom, Holmfirth. A mile up the road towards Holmbridge there are also the remnants of still-functioning textile giant Bottoms Mill with its impressively phallic chimney, and which now houses several small businesses. Meanwhile the Holmfirth Coop car park is cheerfully called Crown Bottom, and even better as if a team of Carry On films scriptwriters had been busy there, there is a lone 2-armed sign next to Sainsbury’s, one prong saying Crown Bottom and the other one urging…Toilets…  

Now and again you find certain cineastes and even lofty professors praising the Carry On movies that starred Sid James, Hattie Jacques and Kenneth Williams, and which milked suggestive sexual and lavatorial doubles entendres for all they were worth. That maverick and fitful genius of a UK director Ken Russell (1927-2011) got it right however when he economically declared that they were ‘rubbish’, if only because they only ever harp on one note, viz. the nudge nudge one, and let’s face it none of them are in the same insinuating and sectionable lunatic league as that Monty Python virtuoso Eric Idle (born 1943).

What is genuinely fascinating about places with embarrassing names, is that their citizens on the whole adaptively cut off from the punning sometimes lewd associations, and phonetically and semantically simply accept the name as an innocent given. My far-flung friends all laugh at my Norridge Bottom address, but the Holmfirthers who have lived here all their lives, take it amnesically for granted and have to struggle to comprehend the bawdy echo of those hamlet names, the Upper and Lower Thongs and the decidedly subterranean Lower Hagg. Given that I am a writer, and as a rule highly sensitive to words, this non-recognition or selective amnesia is even more dramatic in my own peculiar case. Let me explain. I grew up in West Cumbria and lived 8 miles from the Lake District fringe town of Cockermouth (population 9000) famous for Wordsworth and his daffodils. People don’t believe me but I swear I that was all of 25 in 1975, before I realised the bawdy homophony of the innocent market town’s name, which is of course phonetically a corruption of fellatio. I only discovered it because a friend had been to a Workington club to see the black comedian and ex professional footballer Charlie Williams (1927-2006) and Charlie had begun his warm up by saying what kind of filthy name is that, this town near here you call Cockermouth? The polar opposite of my slowcoach recognition, can currently be seen in a highly educated Londoner friend of mine turned Cumbrian, who lives an hour’s drive from picturesque Wordsworthville, which she invariably and impishly refers to as Nob In Gob. Hearteningly though I realise I am not the only cognitive blockhead, as the annual Cockermouth Rock Festival which began in 2007, has from the word go, dubbed itself guess what? Yes, that’s right CockRock. Understand that the organisers are no doubt family folk with little kids and no way are they striving to shock or offend either the peaceable locals or the world at large. Just  like myself and Daffodiltown, aka Fellatio on the Hill, they simply haven’t noticed the glaring implications of the 2 elements, which subliminally suggest both a male erection made out of pre-stressed concrete, and a harking back to good old heavy rock music where the unashamed erotic vigour was exemplified in the forthright albeit punning hence unactionable lyrics of such as Led Zeppelin.

Squeeze my lemon

Till the juice runs down my leg…

Aw aw aw aw…

Some people have it very hard though (oops), don’t they? I’m more than glad that I don’t live in Wyre Piddle, Worcs, UK (population 500) nor in Piddle Trenthide, Dorset (also 500…could it be that all the Piddles weigh in at half a thousand?) as I believe my imagination and my very Istigkeit would be somehow impalpably scented with urine if I did. Even gladder am I, that I don’t live in Scunthorpe, Lincs, UK. I have never visited the town, but it is said to be a grim kind of place, and an object of unkind derision. But believe me yet again that it was only about a month ago, when I was 69 and a half, that I realised because someone pointed it out to me, that it is the only British place name that contains four letters which Scrabble-wise might have you banned from competition if you used them at e.g. a hilarious church fete. I have several women friends who really hate that four letter word, for as well as in raw and abrasive Anglo Saxon terms denoting the female genitals, it is used very often as a venomous term of abuse, and before you argue the case, the male equivalent of ‘prick’ has nothing like its popularity nor its vicious anger quotient…

Postscript. While I was googling to find the elusive population of one of the Thongs, Wikipedia kindly observed that people like me tend also to be looking for the nearby town of Penistone (population, 23,000) which lies between Holmfirth and Barnsley. You’ll never guess of course how uproarious inroaders as opposed to stoic locals have renamed the unfortunate place?

Could there really, I ask myself, be somewhere in this always surprising world, possibly in the redneck Midwest of the USA, that is happy nay extremely proud to call itself Penistown?

The next post will be on or before Sunday 14^th June