I guess if monetized properly big part of those 100 people could live off the name alone. It's also sad to see this tiny cultural artifact go just because few people are inconvenienced. The stone roads and tiny alleys in the old town are inconvenient yet we don't go bulldozing it all down.
How do you think they can monetize it? How do you monetize random strangers coming to your town, taking photos of themselves in sometimes "lascivious poses" with your sign and sometimes stealing it? What's the business angle there?
It's a tiny village. Such places often have a real sense of community that you don't have elsewhere. Injecting a lot of sexual nonsense into their little town because of the name likely feels rather rapey to them.
That's sort of like the old fashioned advice that if a woman is going to be raped and can't avoid it, she should try to enjoy the ride -- which is all kinds of deeply offensive and morally depraved.
These people find this behavior offense, offensive enough that they changed the name. They don't seem to find the name offensive. They seem to only find the behavior of random people coming to their village offensive and they don't know another way to stop it.
Perhaps that solves the financial part, but it doesn't solve the part where people who speak some other language are sexualizing the name of their town which apparently wasn't named that way to make some kind of sexual statement.
I'm for the decriminalization of sex work, but I also think that needs to be something someone chooses and is not compelled to do. The very definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent, which is why we can distinguish between kink and rape: People can consent to BDSM. The definition of rape does not hinge on the detail of whether or not it is physically aggressive or even violent.
If their primary issue is that it is an affront to their sense of dignity, making money off of it doesn't fix the issue. That's a bit like saying "If you give a few bucks to the woman you raped, it's somehow okay now that she didn't want to have sex with you."
She's highly unlikely to feel like giving her money afterwards somehow makes it okay to assault her.
Rape is a highly traumatic event. Getting offended at a foreigner’s well-meaning amusement that your town name means something funny in their language... doesn’t elicit much sympathy from me at all.
Now getting your signs stolen isn’t very nice at all and becomes less well-meaning, I agree. But I hardly think the joke itself is anything immoral at all.
So if your five year old child has a good view of this sign from their window at home in a tiny village or walks past it regularly on their way home from school and is thereby exposed to random strangers from across the globe pretending to have sex while taking photos, you are supposed to care more that random people on the internet feel you have no right to be incensed and change the name than about the negative impacts to the people of the village where you live?
I cannot fathom why so many people are objecting to their right to change the name of their village. They don't like what's happening. They don't need the world's permission to say "I can't stop assholes from around the globe from being assholes, but I can change the damn name that is their excuse for acting like butts to my town." and now people think it's the townspeople who are in the wrong and not the random assholes from across the globe whose bad behavior they got fed up with.
Wow.
I think I need to get off of HN for a bit. This is just ridiculous.
I’m not objecting to them changing their name, they can do whatever they want with their own town. I’m objecting to the idea that it’s somehow immoral for foreigners to find something about your town amusing.
And yeah, maybe don’t be so prudish. Children seeing random strangers shaking their hips isn’t the end of the world. I personally find that ridiculous. But probably a little bit less ridiculous still than your initial comparison of this to rape of all things.
Exactly this, the people from Austria and southern Germany don't find that name offensive at all. They've had enough. And now they exert their right to be left alone and not be harassed by a serious number of english speaking idiots. Places ending in -ing hasnt the same grammatical meaning like doing something, that scheme is really common (Mering, Kissing, Manching, Piding, Peiting, and hundreds more). It's the same idiots that beleaguer known instagram photo spots - just a worse kind. And only for some quick silly joke that humiliates the people there. This will hopefully stop the influx of assholes stealing the village's signpost, "insta posing" at the village sign and making prank calls. Also note that normal people live there, probably in a closer knit arrangement than you normally would assume (3 digit inhabitants). I'm rather sure that persons who profit off the infamous name are looked down to (eg. the silly "Fucking Hell" beer brand, "hell" meaning light in that case in german). Dont forget it's normal people living over there, Doctors, Engineers, Farmers - and they want to be treated that way :)
Austrian here. I don't think they have much of a problem with the sexual aspect of the name, but while it may be funny initially, the joke really gets old after years and years of prank calls. I guess they just have had enough.
I'm not living there but I would guess that profiteering off the name is seen with contempt as it approves of the meaning. At least for older people. Tbh, your suggestion to cash in on that silly phenomena wouldnt make it stop. Not everything that can be profitable needs to be done :-)
Well, it'd stop the vandalism and town theft, the originally defined issue: Free publicity that leads to sign posts being stolen. For a tiny village of 100 people, this is likely a serious hardship.
But more notably, it's a way of moving the problem into a more concretely defined space, ideally out of sight and out of mind (and the money is just a bonus). Such a shop would become like the tourist portion of any large city -- a place locals avoid, and captures most of the visting rabble.
You'll still have your vandals and troublemakers on the street, but hopefully at significantly reduced rates.
I noted that it sounded like an attractive nuisance. I failed to list all the ways in which it was an attractive nuisance and only focused on the part where it's obviously costing a small town money.
Then HN pedantry and argumentation kicked in.
The townspeople clearly see it as an attractive nuisance and not as free publicity. They chose to change the name because it's such a nuisance. Now a bunch of people on HN feel the townspeople were wrong to handle it that way and have a zillion criticisms and solutions.
The townspeople didn't ask HNs permission or opinion. And a lot of the comments here before I noted that it's an attractive nuisance were basically junior high style humor listing all the towns with "bad word" names and giggling about it -- which I initially participated in and then deleted those comments to try to behave in accordance with HN rules and treat the article in a more serious fashion, at which point I made my comment about it being an attractive nuisance.
And that's apparently where I made my wrong turn for the day. And there is no cure for where that took me, it seems.
I think you made your wrong turn when you equated this to the heinous crime of rape.
You are no doubt correct, which is aggravating to me for a long list of reasons.
From the article:
Increasing numbers of English-speaking tourists have made a point of stopping in to snap pictures of themselves by the signpost at the entrance to the village, sometimes striking lascivious poses for social media.
The word is not a sexual word in German. It is in English. This is being forced on the village without their consent and it is leading to sexualized behavior without their consent.
When one man does that to one woman, we define it as rape. When a bunch of tourists do that to a town, we point and laugh and act like the town is overreacting and doesn't have a sense of humor.
Over the years, I have tried to think of another example of something where we make this distinction that if we agree to it, it's a good thing and if we don't then it's a bad thing. Rape vs "making love" is the only one I know where we make that distinction and the legal distinction hinges on the detail of consent.
There was a case where a man and woman were getting divorced and she accused him of rape and there was film of the incident because violent sex was her kink. He was found innocent. Violent sex with consent is kink or BDSM, not rape. Rape is about lack of consent, not about the degree of violence.
Rape is not always as clear cut as people would like to imagine. It's really common for women to feel confused about whether or not what happened to them was really rape, in part because people imagine that rape is some kind of violent assault and not simply the detail of lack of clear consent.
The legal definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent and this town is having a sexualized thing forced upon them without their consent. It's unfortunate that people feel I am somehow "escalating" this to a much more terrible thing than it is rather than seeing my remarks as clarifying part of why this is so extremely objectionable to the townspeople.
What's the "equivalent" of repeatedly ripping their sign out of the ground and stealing it?
These people feel violated. I've seen people on HN used the word rape to describe how they feel about something done to them against their will by, say, Facebook.
It gets used metaphorically that way routinely because we don't really have another good word for "I feel egregiously violated because of something someone did to me without my consent or against my will." We use it that way without it involving physical contact.
> What's the "equivalent" of repeatedly ripping their sign out of the ground and stealing it?
I thought you were talking about the sexual acts.
Stealing the sign is just theft. The equivalent is also theft.
> I've seen people on HN used the word rape to describe how they feel about something done to them against their will by, say, Facebook.
Yes, but they will readily admit that it is hyperbole, not what they actually think about the act. If they treat it as a serious comparison, that will get strongly argued against.
You are saying that the actual definition of rape is fitting here, which is in a different ballpark from hyperbole.
"Merchandizing, where the real money from the movie is made."
I recently passed through the town of Weed, California and bought a tie-dye hoodie from a gas station with the town name on it. Didn't need the hoodie, but they sold them so I bought one for the novelty. Voilà! Business angle.
Probably they are not interested in this bad humor and selling hoodies. Also not everything in life is counted in dollars, selling a hoodie with a rapey joke? You think they need that.
Although one theory of the origin of the name is the German word for light or bright, most people these days don't find the word Hell particularly offensive and it's not sexually explicit. Fuck or Fucking is still considered "extremely offensive" by some people and it's sexual.
But more to the point, if people in Hell, Michigan choose to monetize the name of their town instead of change it, hey, that's their choice and it should in no way dictate what people in Austria choose to do about the problem they currently have with the issues caused by the name of their town.
I don't know why people in this discussion feel like their solution or suggestion is more correct than what locals decided they wished to do about the problem. It's not like their solution involved sacrificing babies to a dark god.
Unfortunately they were a bit late with that, the beer that uses the village as it's namesake, Fucking Hell, is from a business a few miles over the border in Germany. (they surely won't rebrand though)
That's not even funny. Maybe "My sister/friend/whomever went to Austria and I all I got was this Fucking t-shirt" would be sort of funny.
But "She went to fucking and all I got was this fucking t-shirt" isn't really a good joke. There's no surprise element. There's no "gotcha." There's no epiphany of "Oh, I get it!"
Spoken like a true entrepreneur. But you know, there are people out there, in small villages that have quiet lives that nobody ever hears about and they are perfectly happy. I'm really amazed at all the "We can monetize this" and "It's free publicity" statements here. How about admiring these people for their wish to maintain tranquility in the village the know and love?
Join now the club where "opportunity" is more valuable than "freedom"! (hey, it might be an evolutionary trait, but I suck at surviving and I'm ok with it)
The second part of my comment was in the same spirit as well - how about we admire this peculiar linguistic artifact, embrace and enjoy it rather than optimize everything like robots. Europe especially is completely bent over preserving old cultural architecture and artifacts - what's wrong with wanting to preserve _new_ architecture and artifacts?
I don't know anything about beer, but I've spent a minute looking this up before, so here's a surprise German lesson:
‘Hell‘ means bright. Sometimes, ‘light‘ is the correct translation (e.g. light blue is ‘hellblau‘ in German). But in this context, it means pale, as in pale lager[0]. Nothing to do with reduced alcohol content or calories. The German translation for that kind of ‘light‘ (as in ‘light beer‘) would be ‘leicht‘ (lightweight) or ‘light‘ (as a loanword from English).
Also, it's not ‘our town name‘; it's ‘their town name‘. Fucking Hell isn't made in Fucking; it's not even from Austria.
> The German translation for that kind of ‘light‘ (as in ‘light beer‘) would be ‘leicht‘
It can be used that way, but it's not the only meaning: Leicht und stark also refer to a beer's gravity[1] instead of its alcohol content per se. A Starkbier in particular is a beer with 16° on the Plato scale[2] (which does go along with more alcohol, so in a way this distinction is splitting hairs).
Thank you for that. I knew I was on shaky ground with the translation. I know nothing about beer and my German is rusty and I didn't do a lot of digging before posting.
My main point stands: It doesn't mean "fucking hell" in German.
Kind of like that song "What does the fox say?" The two brothers didn't expect it to be so successful. In fact, they intended it to be a joke on some TV show they were doing or something like that. They were planning ahead of time to be all "We got our big break and this is the garbage we produced!"
I talked to an American who was sure that it was intended to be a play on words. She heard it as "What the fucks?" and she figured that's why it was so popular.
That may well be part of why it took off -- because it's something for English speakers to snicker about -- but I kind of doubt it was originally planned that way. People who speak English as a second language -- or anything as a second language -- routinely say "bad" things without intending it or even realizing it.
So someone may be doing it ("it" being naming the beer something naughty to the English speaking ear) on purpose because it's funny to people who speak English. But this isn't a case of "laughing with you." It's very much a case of "laughing at you" and the people being laughed at aren't enjoying it and they decided to put a stop to it wrt their town name.
And I feel like I'm getting a lot of hostility for being on the side of the villagers who feel mistreated and don't want to put up with it anymore. And it's an icky thing to be feeling right now and to be observing how this went down overall.
