Has this ever happened to you: you’re on a school computer in high school or something and you go to search for something like “shitake mushrooms” but the results gets blocked because your search terms included the string “shit?”

Or maybe you’re typing an email and include the location of Lightwater in Surrey, England, and later find that your email was blocked because it contained the substring “twat?”

Turns out that such blocking of false positives by spam filters and forums has a name: the Scunthorpe problem—named after a 1996 incident where AOL’s profanity filter blocked residents of Scunthorpe from creating accounts because the word contains the subscript “cunt.”

Here’s the Wiki page if you’re interested in a few more examples; I just never knew that this problem had a specific name.