One of my hobbies is travelling around and during my travels I see names that I find amusing like Geilhausen which can be translated as “Gay/kewl housing” or Waldfischbach (which translates to “forest fish brook” and it makes me think about what special kinds of fishes live in the forest). But today I want to talk about more IT-related town names.
Travelling from here to Switzerland first you encounter Vimbuch (“das Buch” is “book” in German and the town is named after St. Find. Really!). The only problem is that they had to wait over seven centuries in order for people to understand that it’s not named after an editor manual.
In twenty kilometres from it you can find Urloffen (“offen” is “open” in German). One can only wonder what its inhabitants did for over eight centuries before hyperlinks were invented.
Another thirty kilometres to the south you can find Rust.
And if you continue following the road you may end in Switzerland and see Speicherstraße in canton St. Gallen (“der Speicher” is “storage” e.g. HDD in German; the road is not impressive at all even compared to the old PATA buses). But let’s not go there, it’s a neutral place. After all, there’s Speicher near Bitburg and you know it’s a very safe storage if they build a castle for a single bit.
But speaking of the programming languages, there’s a place called Perl in the remotest rural place of Saarland (a federal land often regarded to be exactly the remotest rural piece of Germany in the eyes of people not living there). The fun thing is not only the fact that it borders Schengen Area (yes, that town is right across the river) but also that the rail line continues to Apache in France (since French famously suck at spelling, they forgot a letter in the web server’s name).
And that’s all names I can remember immediately not counting the mountain range Eifel but who remembers a programming language named after it anyway?
Those sure are some funny town names 🙂 I do believe that geil translates to horny and not gay. Regards and enjoy your travels 🙂
You’re right, I just tried to allude to the “gay old time” expression which has changed its perceived meaning in the last decades (which might’ve happened to the town name as well—or not, you never know).