The famed British explorer Captain Cook and his surveyor Michael Lane mapped the coast of Newfoundland in the late 18th century. Both “had a keen sense of humor,” writes William Baillie Hamilton, in his Place Names of Atlantic Canada, “and were not above enshrining descriptive names that might offend the overly sensitive.” Hence we have Tickle Bay, Cuckolds Cove, Witless Bay, Blow Me Down (where Cook’s men sailed through squalls), and Famish Gut and Pinchgut Point (where they ran low on rations). But no place name in Newfoundland has raised more eyebrows than the tiny town of Dildo.

View Maphead: Dildo, Newfoundland in a larger map

The origin of Dildo’s name is uncertain. As early as 1711, it was being used for a tiny offshore island there, but the island’s connection with any kind of sex toy is uncertain at best. At the time, “dildo” was a word used for any cylindrical object, from nautical pins to test tubes. It was also a type of tree and a nonsense syllable used in song refrains, so the island’s name could have referred to any of these.

In modern Dildo, a bleakly pretty harbor town about an hour west of the provincial capital of St. John’s, many of the 1,200 remaining residents vaguely believe that the town was named for a Spaniard of that name who must have explored the Canadian coast many centuries ago. “I feel sure that we’ve been here a lot longer than artificial penises have been around,” assistant postmistress Stella Wright told The Independent in 1995.

Michelle Gilders / Alamy

The whaling and fishing industries that built the town have mostly dried up, so today Dildo relies on its unusual name to draw in most of its visitors. Every summer, the town holds a Dildo festival, in which the parade is led by a wooden statue of an old fishing-boat skipper called Captain Dildo. Souvenir T-shirts, which disconcertingly read “I Survived Dildo Days,” are hot items.

But not everyone in town is in love with the Dildo brand. Many other places in Newfoundland have toned down their odd names of late (Cuckolds Cove is now Dunfield, Silly Cove is now Winterton, Famish Gut is now Fairhaven) and in the 1980s, a local electrician named Robert Elford believed Dildo should get on board. He circulated a petition hoping to change the town’s name to Seaview or Pretty Cove, but neighbors mostly scoffed and his crusade went nowhere. Dildo pride is a force to be reckoned with.