Skip to My Loo!

There are a lot of names for the littlest room in your house.  Some in Australia call it the dunny, with the most prominent furnishing called the thunderbox.  Many in France refer to it as le vay-say.  In England it’s called the loo or the WC, but don’t be confused by signs that say, “To Let,” if you want to avoid jail.  Some in the U.S. call it the throne room even though we’ve never had a king.  The ruler of my house growing up called it the thundermug.

If you haven’t figured out what I’m talking about by now, you could be in deep, uh…you know.

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There are many Americans living today who have never had the honor of using an outdoor toilet.  The outhouse, whose meaning should be quite clear, was often called a privy which comes from the older English term for it.  They called it the privacy room.

Just makes sense, doesn’t it? 

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How about this? 

The outhouse usually consists of a little building enclosing one or two seats, sometimes just appropriately sized holes in a flat board, over a box that either contains or prevents the escape of the stuff that humans drop into it.  The sounds that accompany such a “dropping” should explain why the Australians nicknamed the little house a thunderbox.

Along the same line, when the outhouse moved indoors, the box was replaced by a porcelain bowl that looks a lot like an old fashion coffee cup.  That’s why my dad used to call it the thundermug.

Now it starts getting fun.

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A friend returned from a trip to England to tell me that many English citizens call the necessary room the loo.  She didn’t know why but I did some research and found the following.

Many, many years ago, in the days before flushing toilets, some city dwellers kept a covered container in their bedrooms at night for those times when they just had to “go” but didn’t want to make a trip outside.  They’d just use the chamber pot, then replace the cover to hold in odors, and go back to bed.  The next morning they would empty the pot into the outhouse.  In those days when a town’s sewer consisted of a little ditch down the middle of the street, city dwellers often just opened a window and threw the contents of the container out into the streets.  More conscientious Brits yelled something like, “look out below,” which cut down on the number of people being doused with…well, stuff they’d hate to step in.  Some Englishman or woman came back from France with the news that the French emptied their chamber pots out the window in the morning too but, instead of hollering, “look out below,” they shouted, “gardez l’eau” which translates to, roughly, “watch out for the water.”  The French phrase caught on and was gradually shortened to, “l’eau” and eventually corrupted to just, “loo!”

If that’s not enough, my friend also told me she learned quickly that most businesses in England denoted their bathrooms with a sign that reads, “WC’” which is short for “water closet.”  Yes, she did learn it quickly, but not quickly enough to avoid a rather embarrassing situation when she saw a sign that said, “To Let” and assumed it was England’s form of “toilet”.  Nope, “To Let” is their version of our, “For Rent.”

You don’t want to know what my friend went through before she learned the difference.  Put it this way, she’ll never make that mistake again.

I guess the French wanted revenge for the English stealing “Loo” from them, so they started calling their bathrooms “le vay-say”, which is French for “WC”. 

After all, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence…or over the septic tank.

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I’ve heard a lot of people call a toilet, “the crapper.”  A modern-day gentleman would never use that term in front of a lady but the truth is, the word doesn’t refer to excrement in any form.  Nope, way back in 1861, a young man set himself up as a sanitary engineer, with his own brass foundry and workshops.  His company eventually earned nine patents, three for improvements he made to the toilet.  Among his enhancements was the plumber’s trap, which prevents odorous sewer gas from coming back up through the pipe and into the house, and the ballcock, which controls the amount of water in the toilet tank.

The potty pioneer’s name was Thomas Crapper…and that’s no crap…really.

Mr. Crapper was born long after the word “crap” was already being applied to excrement.  That word actually derived from “chaffe” which means the waste hulls and stalks removed from wheat and other grains when they are cleaned prior to being ground into meal, as in, “separating the wheat from the chaff.”

Harkening back to the use of Mr. Crapper’s name for the flushing toilet, many who do know about him mistakenly give him credit as the actual inventor of the modern toilet.  Not so, as I indicated above.  No, that distinction is usually given to a British knight named Sir John Harrington, about 60 years before Mr. Crapper’s birth.  We may mistakenly think that Thomas Crapper invented the flushing toilet, but we do honor the true inventor, Mr. Harrington, every time we tell someone we are visiting the John.

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Want some more interesting facts about the porcelain throne?  How about these:

According to one study, the more apps you have on your smart phone, the more time you spend in the bathroom.

Over 7-million people in the U.S. admit to having dropped their cell phone in the toilet. 

Believe it or not, the above fact is unrelated to the fact that scientists say cell phones have 18 times more fecal bacteria than a toilet handle.

Did you know that more than a billion people in the world still poop out in the open?

A study says that 20% of people do not wash their hands after using the bathroom.  It gets worse.  Only 30% of those who do wash their hands, use soap.  What the…!

About 90% of Afghanistan residents have a television, but only 7% have a toilet.

In 1989, an American murderer named Michael Anderson Godwin was spared a death sentence by the electric chair… only to die accidentally by “electric” toilet, after biting into the wire of his TV headphones while he was still on the steel privy.

Toilet paper was invented in China in the 6th century.  I don’t want to know what they wiped with before that.

Even today, 70-75% of the world’s population does not use toilet paper.  E-e-e-ew!

Studies say that humans spend from two months to three years of their lives on the toilet.

The average person goes to the toilet 2500 times a year.  That works out to almost seven times a day.  Because I know I use it less than that, and I assume a lot of other people are like me, it seems to indicate something I’ve always thought.  Some people really are full of crap.

The oldest known toilet resides in a small castle on the island of Knossos, Greece.  It is 1600 years old…and it still works.  Yes, really.

Three-fourths of Americans agree with me, that the right way to put toilet paper in the holder is so that it comes off of the front of the roll.

Rome had public toilets before toilet paper was invented.  Everyone sat in one big room on benches with holes in them for obvious purposes.  Everyone was basically one big happy family…although they probably shouldn’t have been.  They talked to each other, told jokes and laughed, and even shared a tool consisting of wooden handle with a sponge on the end.  Yes, it was used to wipe in those days before toilet paper.  And, yes, that is where the expression, “got the wrong end of the stick,” came from.  Really.

Well, now that you are flush with knowledge, I have only one question left.  Who the heck studies this crap?

Sorry, I couldn’t help it.

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