A woodsman, nodding slowly

So this is finally the way to foil LLMs

Marty McFly, watching The Honeymooners premiere.

👆

Kevin, his chili on the floor.

Absolutely! I love this stuff. So, etymologically, the English word “toilet” (meaning the fixture where we put pee and poop) derives from the French word “toile,” meaning “cloth used for washing.” It’s actually also the source of the English word “towel.” But the way it got from “towel” to “poop hole” is complicated, and basically predicated on the reality that humans are squeamish about poop but have to talk about it kind of a lot (to find a place to put it, or excuse oneself so that they can put it there).

When indoor flush toilets were first introduced, the fixture itself was called a “sanitary basin.” The room was called a “water closet,” named in contrast to an “earth closet” (which was a… ehm…*non-*flush toilet. Basically, poop in a bucket, burn the contents of the bucket. The “earth” was “night earth,” yet another euphemism for “poop”). People would say that they needed to"go to the water closet" instead of saying “I gotta poop.”

But over time, the euphemism weakened. Instead of seeming like a polite way to say “I gotta poop,” it started to become more rude. This happened around the same time that people were putting the poop fixture into the room where you put on your wig or your makeup or whatever, which was already referred to as a “toilet” (referring specifically to the small cloth used in the process of getting ready in the morning, itself also the result of a bunch of euphemistic and memetic mutation). In that process, the word “water closet” started to apply directly to the fixture itself.

Then, over time, that euphemism also weakened, and the word “toilet” also started to seem rude. But again, this happened as people were putting the bathtub into the room with the poop fixture, so the room became the “bathroom” and the fixture became the “toilet.” That particular one happened pretty recently, so depending on your location or your age your grandmother might’ve still called the fixture the “water closet.”

And there are a bunch of other words that have been euphemisms or reverse euphemisms for the fixture or the room or the process (lavatory, washroom, powder room, crapper, commode, throne, drop a deuce, freshen up, see a man about a dog). One of my favorites is “spend a penny:” one of the first flush toilets (not invented by Thomas Crapper, though he would indeed go on to become a major manufacturer of the fixtures) was on display at a World’s Fair. You could use a freshly-cleaned one, and even get a shoe shine at the same time, for a penny. They’re all memes (ideas with symbolic meaning that spread from person to person), all because people are squeamish about poop but need to talk about it.

Which means that the journey of the word “toilet” is through a bunch of memes: Cloth -> room for makeup -> room with poop hole -> fixture where put poop.

You don’t know how to use the three seashells!?

Table cat, screamed and pointed at.

Peter Parker, crying