Living in Taiwan > Most Offensive or Amusing Store name in Taiwan

IF YOU’RE one of those people who thinks “fuck” is a word for mentally impoverished heathens, trailer trash, or that creepy Taiwanese guy with the red teeth who hangs out in front of your apartment block, then you better stop reading right now.

Right.

Rumor has it that English is a language used in Taiwan, but badly and when it comes to naming shops, on the somewhat bizarre side.

Probably the most blatant attention-seeker is the fashion shop spotted by astute Forumosan Grasshopper. Ever-so-subtly named, Mother Fucker caters to all your goddamn clothing needs, dickweed!

Sure, it’s a head-turner, but as Spack commented, it could lead to rather unfortunate misunderstandings:

A: Hey, I like your new dress – where’d you get it?

B: At that new store downtown, Mother Fucker.

A: Bite me!

B: What d’you say, asshole?

Keeping with the fornacatory theme, well-known whackster lane 119 turned our attention to the Fuck Tea Shop in Taichung, and then proceeded to graciously give us the etymology of the word and its alleged first usage – from a line in a poem composed in a mixture of Latin and English sometime before 1500 – “Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk.” The last bit is code, so lane119 says, and the sentence eventually distills out to, “They are not in heaven because they fuck wives of Ely [a town near Cambridge].” But you knew that.

Rounding out close encounters of the middle-finger kind comes from slurpcheese and the Fuck Disco Pub in Taichung, which as Tigerman points out may in fact be quite aptly titled.

Of course before you go to one of these places you’ll want to look your best. No problemo, just stop into the Hair Box salon. Don’t know if they straighten afros, but you could ask….

Turning to a shop in the suburb of Banchiao, a suburb often referred to as the “Parisian gutter of Taipei,” Toe Save helps us to find just the right wedding dress shop. Hard to know, though, if white is the color of choice at Scatland.

Shit! All this shopping is making me tired. Better take a load off and what better place than at the Stool Pasta Restaurant near the Wanlong MRT Station? BlueintheFace assures us that the food really isn’t crappy. Hey, and the place even has stools to sit on. What a gas!

And speaking of a place to put your keister….

Falcon points out a shop on Chungshan North Road from the Vietnam War era where “the sign maker had miscalculated the width of the shop front, and so he had to chop the last two letters off of the English language sign…what the heck, he figured…the English-speaking crowd will probably understand it anyway…so there it was on the front of the shop in giant neon brilliance: HIGH CLASS TAIL.”

Not to be outdone, a shop in Shihlin has the unfortunate name, A-Hole Software, so ImaniOU informs us. I don’t know if ImaniOU is just lucky or if she goes out looking for this stuff, but she has also uncovered the whereabouts of ASS Service Centers…exactly what they service is best left to the imagination.

And rounding out the body parts naming section we have a clothing store that used to be near the Taichung Train Station, so zzcat tells us, “aristocratically” called Cuntessa.

I assume that this sounds like something completely different in Chinese…perhaps less anatomical?

Anyway, it seems to me that all these jokers who named these shops ought to be rounded up and taken to the Phig Good fast food place in Taidong and have their mouths washed out with “corn soap.”

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Click Here is a bi-weekly column based on posts at www.forumosa.com, a forum for Taiwan’s online community.