An off-color street name (proposed but not accepted)

[Wilson Gray]

This reminds me of the time that a student assistant of mine who was
of Serbian descent mentioned to me that her grandmother would neither
speak the word "pizza" nor would she allow the word to be spoken in
her presence. The old lady explainedthat the word was too close to a
Serbian obscenity for her comfort. The student wondered whether I had
any idea what that word was and what it meant. Naturally, anyone with
a  slightly more than trivial knowledge knows that the word is "pizda"
and what its meaning is. Back in 1960, there was a local bank in
Monterey, CA, composed of second-generation Russians who took that
word as their name, much to the disgust of their elders.

Historical anecdote, when the word "cun" from Latin _cunnus_ became
obscene in  Rumanian, it was replaced by the Slavic "pizda." However,
the replacement itself eventually became obcene and "vagin," from
French "vagine," is now the standard term.

-Wilson Gray

On 9/18/05, Cohen, Gerald Leonard <gcohen at umr.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Cohen, Gerald Leonard" <gcohen at UMR.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: An off-color street name (proposed but not accepted)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>      I can add to the subject of Laurence Urdang's e-mail message below.
> An article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Jan 26, 2005, Section C, p. 1/1-4 unwittingly tells about cell-phone viruses called "Gavno." (They enter the phones as Trojan horses disguised as repair files).  The article includes a picture of a cellphone beside which is the following quote in bold letters: "Once a user installs Gavno, they may find it difficult, if not impossible to repair the phone."
>
>      Small wonder. Gavno is a Russian word (spelled govno but pronounced /gavNO/ and is the vulgar term for "excrement." We deal of course with both a product and its name deriving from a twisted mind. ---  I sent a  Jan. 26, 2005 message on this topic to ans-l and ads-l and later treated it briefly in my Comments on Etymology, April 2005, p. 22.
>
> Gerald Cohen
>
> > ----------
> > From:         American Name Society on behalf of Laurence Urdang
> > Reply To:     American Name Society
> > Sent:         Sunday, September 18, 2005 9:10 AM
> > To:   ANS-L at LISTSERV.BINGHAMTON.EDU
> >
> > A nominal episode took place a year or two ago in Old Lyme, Connecticut. The local waste removal company is situated on Hatchetts Hill Road, which was divided, in about 1967, by the construction of I-95. A problem arose because of the split, for, in case of emergency, emergency services didn't know which part of the road to go to, north or south of I-95, and going first to the wrong one might cause a dangerous delay of 15 minutes or more. So the owner of Shoreline Sanitation, a man of Polish descent, petitioned the town to rename the part on which his facility stands, "Guvno Road." They were about to effect the change when I noted something about it in a local paper and at once wrote to the First Selectman.
> > When he proposed it, the owner said that, in Polish, guvno (actually gowno, with an accent over the first o that changes its sound to that in English good) means 'rubbish,' and that his mother uses it all the time. Well, he is not a native speaker of Polish, and his mother evidently doesn't know Polish very well, either, or has a vulgar mouth, for the only accurate translation of gowno into English is 'shit,' plain and simple: not "waste, garbage, detritus, pooh, stool, bowel movement, faeces," or anything mincing or clinical like that; just the plain, four-letter denotation with all its impedimenta of slangness and tabooness.
> > Without further ado, the petition was denied, and nothing further was ever heard about it. Also, I didn't even receive a note of thanks for having saved the town from some embarrassment.
> > Ah, yes! There must be millions of other stories like that in the Naked Country, all dealing with names that did not escape the scrutiny of somebody who knows how to curse in Polish.
> > L. Urdang
> >
> >
> > Laurence Urdang
> > 4 Laurel Drive
> > Old Lyme, Connecticut 06371
> > U.S.A.
> > (860) 434-2104
> >
>


--
-Wilson Gray