Would you blush to admit you lived in Crotch Crescent in Oxford? Once again, newspaper stories have sprouted about rude-sounding place-names. It all seems rather artificial.
What happens is that a company seeking publicity (this time a financial products outfit) finds a list of place-names that could be taken as rude. They get a survey company to show the list to innocent bystanders, who say which they find rudest. Newspapers obligingly publish the graded list as though it were news: Fanny Avenue, Crotch Crescent, Titty Hill, Wetwang, Shitterton… down to Jackass Avenue and Great Snoring. (Are those two even rude?)
In truth, Crotch Crescent is named after a child prodigy and composer, William Crotch (1775-1847). He had a terrible time as a child being led about like some musical bear. Then at 21 he was appointed Professor of Music at Oxford, a post he held until his death.
I’d assumed that Crotch was connected in origin with cross; a street in the City of London is called Crutched Friars, after an order with a cross on their habit. But crotch is of unknown origin according to the OED.
If crotch is irresistibly funny only to Finbarr Saunders in Viz comic, what of Wetwang? To my surprise its meaning is given as ‘field of summons for the trial of a dispute’ (from Old Norse vetvangr) by Victor Watts in the Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names. The –wang is definitely ‘field’, though the OED lists the word under wong (in which form it appears in Beowulf).
But Tolkien, who knew of such matters, uses Wetwang as the English equivalent of the Sindarin (elvish) Nindalf, where nin– means ‘wet’. The Yorkshire village of Wetwang has a pond and is distinguished from Driffield nearby, which is the ‘dry field’ – though again Watts gives a different derivation, from drit (‘dirt’).
My husband has just told me that I’ve spoilt the joke, but I’m not sure there was much of one in the first place.
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