This is the funniest headline today:
🇫🇷🗳️ INSOLITE | Charles Hittler, maire sortant, et Monsieur Zielinski s’affrontent pour les municipales à Arcis-sur-Aube. pic.twitter.com/OqIeSXFypR
— Cerfia (@CerfiaFR) March 17, 2026
You don’t need a translation. Look at the last names.
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And the family just… hasn’t bothered?… to change the name, in all these years?
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Which one, though? Hitler or Zielensky? :-))))))
In first grade, there was a girl in my class whose last name was a very rude word for female genitals. The poor child suffered terribly. I have no idea what the parents were thinking.
Aside from the girl’s suffering, I learned that word in class because nobody in my family used such language.
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Your name is your name, though. Especially your family name. There are an estimated 13000 people in the US who still have the last name Kuntz, not counting variant spellings like Koontz, Kunz, Kuntze, etc. All perfectly innocuous in German. And yet, even after generations in the US and all the grief that probably comes with it… a lot of people hang onto the name.
-ethyl
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“Your name is your name, though. Especially your family name”
Years ago, when I was 13 or so and traveling with my mother who was doing PR work I had to ask a question in a bank.
I found the first person and asked them and they told me I needed to talk to the manager…… Mr. Faggot… I don’t remember much of the encounter beyond trying mightily to act as if I hadn’t noticed his name… helpfully displayed on a name plate on his desk.
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It’s a prickly personal topic, man. Hippie parents. I have one of those names nobody can spell. It was weird-but-OK when I was born.
And then the internet came along: we went from “Oh, what a pretty-but-unusual name!” to “(pained facial contortions) Oh… uh… well.” (there are now a number of pop-culture references that they could be thinking about, and if they are polite they will not specify which because they are all deeply weird and inappropriate). Yes, the miracle that is the internet suddenly allowed a bunch of useless freaks with overactive fantasy lives and zero creativity to express themselves. In public. And approximately (statistics based on feelings, not data) 30% of the identifies-as-female members of some of the most deeply embarrassing useless-freak subsets have adopted my actual given name as a fantasy internet handle.
But dangitall, it’s been my name for over forty years. Before any of that BS happened. It’s MINE and I don’t want to change it and have to get used to a whole new name just because people are using it to do embarrassing things on the internet.
So yeah. I completely understand the impulse to hang onto your name, in spite of the vibes. If other people can’t handle it like grownups, that’s their problem.
I strongly endorse useful filters and undisclosed litmus tests. This is one more useful filter: people who can’t get past the vibes and the juvenile elbow-elbow-snicker-grimace stage at hearing an unexpected name are not worth knowing anyway.
-ethyl
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The flag in the picture looks suspiciously American, not French or EU at all… Very unusual, even possibly illegal, in a French mayor’s office.
This being said, it seems that Zielinsky will lose to Hittler in the second round of the election:
https://www.lemonde.fr/resultats-municipales-2026/arcis-sur-aube-10006/
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