Thursday, November 09, 2006

The Scunthorpe Problem

A casual conversation with a colleague yesterday about the meaning of 'Thorpe' in many English place-names sent me scattering off to WikiPedia, where I discovered it means 'village'. While on the page entry for Scunthorpe, I discovered that the town's name has been blocked by many spam filters and firewalls because of its incorporation of the word CUNT (not too shy here at Underachievement HQ to utter such vulgarities). And so on a number of internet forums where the name of the Lincolnshire town needed to be used, it was mentioned as 'S***thorpe'. IT folk call it the 'Scunthorpe problem'. I'd be interested to see any statistics for this constituency. A venn diagram might be instructive.

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