perfidy

Via an email from a friend in Florida this afternoon, I found that there's been a brouhaha about road signs in Austria. Witness the map below, specifically the city a couple clicks northeast of the center of the map:

Allegedly, folks keep stealing the signs at the entry points to the city. Knowing Ken as I do, I decided it might be a good idea to attempt validation of the story, and found an initial reference to it, from back in August, 2005, at marijuana.com.

It doesn't particularly surprise me to find a site called "marijuana.com" so much as that I've never had occasion to notice it or that it was basically a pretty lame place. I guess that the site's proprietors are restricted in their ability to really do much with such a unique domain name, given the illegality of marijuana pretty much everywhere in the US. But, that aside, further research showed this, at answers.com {ellipses mine}:

Fucking (IPA: /ˈfʊkɪŋ/—the "u" is pronounced like the "u" in English "put") is a small settlement (population c. 150), part of the municipality of Tarsdorf [2], in the Innviertel region of western Upper Austria, located at 48°02′59″N, 12°50′59″E, bordering Bavaria. [3] It is near the city of Salzburg. The village is known to have existed as “Fucking” since at least 1070 and is named after a man from the 6th century called Focko. “Ing” is an old Germanic suffix meaning “people”; thus Fucking, in this case, means “place of Focko’s people”. [4] {...}

The settlement’s most famous feature is a traffic sign with its name on it beside which English-speaking tourists often stop to have their photograph taken. The sign is the most commonly stolen street sign in Austria.[5] Significant amounts of public funds are spent on replacing the stolen signs. In August 2005 the road signs were replaced with theft-proof signs welded to steel and secured in concrete to make the signs harder to take. [6]

Stories like those below are pure click-bait:

• Brits steal carloads of Fucking Austrian roadsigns
• The Village of Fucking
• What’s the Fucking joke?
• Welcome to Fucking Austria

There's a huge difference, I'm reminded, between "Welcome to Fucking Austria" and "Welcome to Fucking,Austria". In the extended entry, for the morbidly curious (such as me) who enjoy seeing newspaper stories full of f-bombs, a picture of an article describing one of the periodic outbreaks of this menace to municipal stability, along with a picture of the most frequently stolen road sign in Austria, if not all of Europe.