As a Nintendo game, it's no surprise that Animal Crossing: New Leaf contains some form of control over what you can name your characters. What is surprising, though, is how extensive the list of blocked words is.


The obvious culprits are, well, obvious, from curse words to copyrighted terms, but when alientonx tried to get around them with what for most will be an obscurity, he hit the same wall.

The name he entered for his character was "Santorum".


Now, that's a real name. Most prominently it's the name of Rick Santorum, who a decade ago was a Senator at the centre of a controversy over his comments linking gay sex to pedophilia and bestiality.

As a response to this, a campaign was begun - created by columnist Dan Savage and helped along by The Daily Show's John Stewart - to turn the name into a slang term meaning "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex".

It worked. If you google Santorum now, the top result is the Wikipedia page for the "poop lube" campaign.

I'm kind of impressed this is even a thing in the game. We often think of departments like localisation being the domain of a handful of people, but in Nintendo's case, I like to imagine entire floors of people, furiously scouring the internet for every word in existence, in any language, that could even remotely be linked to a controversy.


And as we can see here, doing a damn good job!

I tried to name a character Santorum and [Reddit, via Tiny Cartridge]

Does Rick Santorum Really Have a Google Problem? [New York Mag]