Toilet

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Dr. Goodword
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Toilet

Postby Dr. Goodword » Sun May 18, 2014 11:44 pm

• toilet •


Pronunciation: toy-let • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: 1. A plumbing fixture for defecation and urination, a privy. 2. A room equipped with dressing facilities, a loo. 3. The act of dressing, usually in preparation of going out.

Notes: Here is a word we in the US are reluctant to repeat; rather we substitute bathroom or restroom, and never even mention the object that gives this room its name. That is because Americans never think of today's word in the third sense. I decided to talk about it because its history smells like roses. It has one derivation, toiletry, which includes everything used for personal grooming. "To make your toilet" is to clean yourself up: take a bath or shower, brush your teeth, comb your hair. Toilet water smells positively flowery (depending on its source, of course).

In Play: I guess I'll have to use the word, now, won't I? Let's see how delicately I can apply it: "Darling! Could you come to the bathroom for a minute? I seem to have dropped my wedding ring in the toilet." (Did you notice how genderless I made this example?) Of course, I could always retreat to the metaphoric sense of today's word: "My life went down the toilet the day I met Belle O'Donaugh."

Word History: So how did today's word arrive at such a stinky meaning? English borrowed the word from French toilette "washing up, dressing", then narrowed the meaning to the place where you wash and dress, then to the fixture on which we take care of business. The French word started out as Middle French toilette "clothes bag", a diminutive of toile "net, cloth". Toile is the remnant of Latin tela "a web, net, the warp of fabric" from texere "to weave". The L turns up in various words taken from this stem: subtilus "fine, precise, subtle". This word was originally composed of sub "under" + tela "warp". The same root turn up in Russian as tech' "to weave" and tku "I weave". The farther we get from today's meaning, the better it gets. (Today we thank Perry Lassiter, Grand Panjandrum of the Alpha Agora, for suggesting today's stinky though still Good Word.)
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Slava
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Re: Toilet

Postby Slava » Thu Sep 14, 2023 7:09 am

My take on this is that if Americans are going to use the third sense, it is only about women, and in the French: toilette.
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