(Just don’t take a Zoom meeting in there.) 17. If you’re an Australian in need of a bathroom break, you might head to your little office. Looking-Glass, Jockem Gage, Remedy Critch, and Member MugĪll slang terms for a chamber pot, as seen in Grouse’s Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue. Or, as Merriam-Webster puts it, “a stool holding a chamber pot.” 12., 13., 14., and 15. “A chamber implement,” according to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1759. Why call it toilet paper when you could go with bum fodder or curl paper instead? Grouse defined the former term (one used to refer to badly-written literature) as “soft paper for the necessary house.” 11. Its origins are unknown, but the OED speculates that it might be derived from the word dung according to The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, it’s “thought to be a compound of ‘danna’ (excrement) and ‘ken’ (house).” In Australia, the term is shortened to dunny. Dunnekin and DunnyĪ dunnekin (or dunegan, according to Francis Grose’s 1811 Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue) is slang from the late 18th century for an outhouse and was used in England, Australia, and New Zealand. (Sanitation and public health are linked adding these outhouses to underserved areas would help improve both.) The wooden outdoor structures-which had a concrete foundation and a chimney for ventilation- came to be known as FDRs, Roosevelt Buildings, or Federal Buildings. Less well known, but equally important, are the 2.3 million outhouses built in rural communities around the country as part of the New Deal. FDRįranklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, established as the United States was in the midst of the Great Depression, created a number of new jobs through things like building big infrastructure projects such as the Hoover Dam, New York’s LaGuardia Airport, San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, and more. Once used to refer to a room used to store things like armor, by the 1680s, a garderobe was another name for a privy or toilet-or, as one writer put it at the time, a place for “the private deeds of Nature.” 6. “Ah whip oaf ma keks and sit oan the cold wet porcelain shunky,” Irvine Welsh wrote in Trainspotting. Shankie (sometimes shunkie) and cludgie (or cludge) are delightful Scots slang terms for toilets dating to around the 1970s. Head has been used in this way since the early 1700s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). People in the Navy likely refer to their ship’s bathroom as the head-a term that comes from the bathroom’s placement in the head, or bow, of a ship, where water splashing up from the ocean would clean the area. The term dates back to the early 1600s before it was a necessary house, people would sometimes call it a necessary place, necessary vault, or necessary stool. Going to the bathroom is a necessary function, so calling a privy or outhouse a necessary house makes sense. But if you’re looking for more creative bathroom euphemisms, try using one of these slang terms for toilets and toilet paper the next time you head to the loo. And maybe, in one of your cruder moments, you’ve even referred to it as the sh**ter (no explanation needed for that one, although you may be surprised to know that the term at first referred to a person or creature that pooped before it came to mean a toilet in the 1960s). You’ve called it the John (thought to be taken from Sir John Harrington-godson of Queen Elizabeth I and distant relative of Game of Thrones star Kit Harington-who attempted to create modern flush toilets) and the Crapper (after Thomas Crapper, another toilet innovator).
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