Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms

by Ralph Keyes

  Windbreaks

  Because euphemisms for gas emitted from the rectum are more universal than most, they have proved useful as a tool for tracing the evolution of language. Break wind has been particularly durable. In 1552, an English writer used the phrase “breake wynd vpwards.” Half a century later, an English translator wrote, “He would give folke leave to break wind downward.”

  “Fart” was originally a euphemism, freely used by Chaucer (“This Nicholas anoon leet fle a fart, / As greet as it hadde been a thonder-dent [thunder clap]”) and by Ben Jonson, whose 1610 play The Alchemist included the words “I fart at thee” in its opening soliloquy. At that time and for many decades thereafter, the term “fart” was considered no more offensive than “flatulence” is today. Samuel Johnson included it in his 1755 dictionary, defining “fart” as “to break wind behind,” and illustrating its use with lines written by Jonathan Swift that ended, “He farted first, and then he spoke.” Well into the nineteenth century, “fart catcher” was slang for a valet or footman who walked behind his employer. As so often happens, however, this euphemism took on vulgar overtones and gave way to even more euphemistic synonyms such as passing gas, or, among children, cutting cheese (because when the rind of a wheel of cheese is first cut, a pungent smell of fermented gas escapes).

  Words referring to flatulence have traditionally made distinctions based on the force of gas expulsion. “Fizzle” was a term medieval English speakers used for a discreet passing of gas. When used this way, it is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “to break wind without noise.” To illustrate that obsolete usage, the OED gives this 1601 translation of a work by Pliny the Elder: “they say if Asses eat thereof, they will fall a fizling and farting.” This led to today’s use of “fizzle” for something that leads nowhere (“fizzled out”) and “fizz” for a hissing, sputtering sound.

  Other euphemisms for modest wind breaking are more esoteric. In his novel The Tongues of Angels, Reynolds Price writes of a boy at camp in the 1950s where letting loose an “S.B.D.”—a “silent but deadly fart”—was considered a high art form. In Price’s words, this was “the anonymous invisible outrage that left a room gasping. If no one guessed the culprit within thirty seconds, he got to cry ‘S.B.D.!’ in triumph and could hit us all, one good hard punch.”

  At the other end of the scale are powerful farts known to some as wallpaper peelers. Among those raised in cities, painting the elevator alludes to that type. “In our family,” writes educator Bob Burton Brown, “we all know what it means when one of us asks, ‘Who painted the elevator?’ ” Brown’s compilation of other such euphemisms includes cushion creeper (“I’ve had about all of your cushion creepers I can take”), squeaking chair (“Are you sitting in a squeaking chair?”), and barking spider (“About time to call the exterminators. Those barking spiders are back”).

  Most families have pet euphemisms for flatulence, some rooted in their collective histories. They are a way to acknowledge shared experience and an irreverent sense of humor. Members of one family call farting coo-coo because, when a toddler in that clan was told “Excuse you” after she passed gas, the closest pronunciation this girl could come up with was “coo-coo.” Pop was the term used by another family. (“Who popped?”) One woman recalled that she and her sisters referred to farting as shooting ducks. “I [once] proudly and loudly announced at a restaurant that my older sister was shooting ducks!” she added. “Mother was not amused. Daddy was.”

  Elimination

  It’s only been within the past century that residents of developed countries have enjoyed the luxury of eliminating body waste indoors. Before then, most had to do this outside in an outhouse or on a discreet patch of ground. Telling others where one was going when responding to this call presented a challenge. Women commonly said they were off to pick a daisy or pluck a rose. Men were more likely to go visit my uncle or see a man about a dog. A woman who didn’t realize what this meant once innocently asked a man what kind of dog he was looking for. “A dachshund with four puppies,” the man replied.

  These are just a few of the many euphemisms we’ve used over time for the act of eliminating body waste. As a sometime participant in Friends Meeting for Worship, I’m particularly struck by ones that alluded to this denomination: bury a Quaker for defecation (“I need to go bury a Quaker”), and Quaker burial ground as the place where this is done. No one is quite sure where this locution originated, or why, though R. W. Holder thinks it might have something to do with the brown garb once worn by Quaker men. In Francis Grose’s time, the substance being buried was known to some as Pilgrim’s salve.

  Euphemisms for the elimination of body waste vary by time and place, of course. In Africa, speakers of Swahili may excuse themselves to go to the prayerhouse. Bulgarians go to the thinking place (leading to a euphemism for what they plan to do there: think). Some Spaniards say they’ll be visiting Señor Roca, referring to the Roca brand of bathroom fixtures widely used in that country. During World War II, members of the French resistance responded to a call of nature by announcing, “Je vais téléphoner à Hitler” (“I’m going to call Hitler”) while pinching their nose with one hand and pretending to pull a flush chain with the other.

  In postwar London, where public-lavatory doors cost a penny to open, “Where do I go to spend a penny?” needed no further explanation. Do your duty is a euphemism that has particular resonance to the British. English novelist Catherine Storr was raised in a family that referred to elimination this way (“You may be excused to do your duty”). When she grew up, Storr was startled to discover that this phrase had other meanings. Referring to Admiral Horatio Nelson’s exhortation at the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar (“England expects that every man will do his duty”), Storr wrote that “Nelson’s message to his men sounded to me for years like a very public after-breakfast call.”

  Call of nature has proved the most enduring allusion to this activity. When folklorist Vance Randolph was a child in Scranton, Pennsylvania, his teachers told students that those who felt such a call should raise their hands, then wait to be told, “You may leave the room.” The students themselves converted leave the room into a euphemism for any bodily function, especially farting. (“Oooh, he left the room!”)

  Some time later, a Missourian recited a rhyme for Randolph that went:

  When Nature calls at either door

  Do not refuse her,

  For many an ail is sure to come

  If you abuse her.

  Pee

  Jack Garner, Franklin Roosevelt’s first vice president, once said that his position “wasn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.” “Piss” got changed to “spit” in news coverage, and “spit” it’s been ever since. “Those pantywaist writers wouldn’t print it the way I said it,” Cactus Jack later complained.

  Maybe it’s something about Texas politicians. To explain his refusal to fire the disreputable FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Garner’s fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson famously said he’d rather have someone inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. Not that this concept could be referred to directly by newscasters, then or in succeeding years. After Barack Obama made rival Hillary Clinton his secretary of state, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann speculated about the president’s motives: “Let’s see how I can phrase this: to make sure that she’s expressing herself in the tent rather than expressing herself outside of the tent into the tent?”

  At one time, “piss” was a perfectly reputable synonym for “urine” as a noun, and the act of excreting it as a verb. In a more earthy, less hectic era, Englishmen called a brief period of time a pissing while. The King James Bible referred to men in general as “any that pisseth against the wall.” A late-seventeenth-century schoolbook for American students asked, “Why doth a dog being to piss, hold up one leg?” Because of its diuretic qualities, the common dandelion was called a piss-a-bed in pre-Victorian England (and is still called a pissenlit in France). To this day, we commonly use the semirespectable exp
ressions full of piss and vinegar, piss poor (i.e., “doesn’t have a pot to piss in”), and pissed off. For the most part, though, “piss” has had its day as a reputable term. Nowadays adults pass water, take a leak, empty their bladders, and make room for tea (or for another beer). Men-only euphemisms involve lots of shaking: shake the dew off the lily, shake hands with my wife’s best friend, or, among English soldiers, shake hands with the bloke I enlisted with. Women water the roses and change the canary’s water.

  For the past couple of centuries, wee wee and pee pee have been the euphemisms of choice for most English-speaking children. Kids also tinkle, make, piddle, or simply pee (based on the first letter of “piss”). Some adults do too. During one of California’s chronic water shortages, Senator S. I. Hayakawa (R-CA) proposed this toilet-flushing guideline: “Pee don’t, poo do,” a nifty use of kid speak to make his point without giving offense. Reliance on nursery words is typical of euphemizers like him. When in trouble, the patrician George H. W. Bush was fond of saying he was in “deep doo doo.” After Barack Obama used the expression wee weed up, befuddled members of the press finally concluded that this was street slang for “riled up.” (“ ‘Bed-wetting’ would probably be the more consumer-friendly term,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs later conceded.)

  In an episode of HBO’s The Wire, a retired policeman named Howard “Bunny” Colvin eats in a restaurant with a former colleague who now does security for Johns Hopkins University and with a university administrator who is recruiting Colvin to do the same work. Midway through their meal, the administrator smiles archly and says sotto voce, “Excuse me while I go to the little boys’ room, gentlemen. I need to tinkle.” After he leaves, Colvin says to his former colleague, “Tinkle? I never understood why a grown-ass man gotta talk like that. He needs to take a piss, whether he knows it or not.” The other ex-cop chuckles, assuring him he’ll get used to the way academics speak. When the administrator takes his time returning, this man says, “Wonder what’s keepin’ him? All he had to do was tinkle.” Responds Colvin, “I guess he felt the need to make a dookie too.”

  Poo

  An irreverent dairy near me sells a rich, dark-chocolate ice cream it calls Cow Patty. That’s because “patty” or “pie” at one time referred to mounds of bovine excrement. “Chip” did similar duty. What word could be more innocent? “Chocolate chip,” “ice chip,” “chip on your shoulder.” This is where things get dicey, however. Back in olden days, an American boy itching for a fight might announce this fact by placing a chip on his shoulder, daring anyone to knock it off. To fastidious ears today, “chip” suggests a sliver of wood. But the chip in question was more likely to be a piece of dried cow or buffalo dung. Hard as it is to picture a twenty-first-century boy putting dried shit on the shoulder of his Abercrombie and Fitch polo, having a chip on your shoulder still suggests prickly belligerence.

  Determining the right words to describe solid body waste and its elimination has always been more problematic than choosing ones for liquid waste. According to J. N. Adams, Latin words for urinate such as mingo and melo were less offensive than ones for defecate: caco, merda, and pedo. Some editions of the Bible that freely refer to “piss” are coy when it comes to excrement, calling it, among other things, “that which cometh from thee.” In a similar vein, two centuries ago Moreau de St. Méry complained that women he encountered in America paid so little attention to personal hygiene that their chemises sometimes displayed “marks of that need to which Nature has subjected every animal.”

  Change is no less constant in this category of euphemism than in any other. After all, body wax was once a euphemism for “shit.” When discussing defecation, we resort to face-saving euphemisms, sometimes debasing perfectly good words in the process. “Crap” and “feces” had respectable meanings until they were pressed into euphemistic service (both referred broadly to “residue” or “dregs”). Some of the substitute words in this area vary by profession. Farmers spread manure, and waste managers dispose of biosolids. Doctors analyze fecal matter and stools. But to do this they must ask patients to give them a specimen. Those who work with wildlife talk of droppings, dung, and scat, as well as the casings of worms and guano eliminated by bats, seabirds, and seals.

  What’s wrong with “shit”? What makes us so averse to using that sturdy old term in polite company? Originally spelled “shite,” it is a perfectly good word: terse, forceful, to the point. It has the added benefit of being both a noun and a verb. “Shit” is an integral part of many vivid expressions: “in deep shit,” “up shit creek without a paddle,” “doesn’t know shit from apple butter,” “shit or get off the pot,” “the shit hit the fan,” “get your shit together,” “shoot the shit,” “shit-eating grin,” “shit happens,” “shit list,” “tough shit,” “no shit,” “shitfaced,” and, of course, “bullshit.” Yet, “shit” has become so contaminated by association with the substance to which it refers that in modern times it’s one of our most euphemized words. As Donald Rumsfeld said so memorably when he was defense secretary, “Stuff happens.” During a presidential press conference, Ronald Reagan said “everything hit the fan.” When Reagan’s onetime speechwriter Peggy Noonan was recorded saying “bullshit” in a radio studio (off-mic, she thought), Noonan apologized to readers of her newspaper column for using this “barnyard epithet.” A guest on National Public Radio later referred to the “big stinking pile” that George W. Bush left behind when departing the White House. In a rare show of wit, Bush himself said that walking his dog around his Dallas neighborhood involved “Picking up that which I had dodged for the past eight years.”

  Environmental activist Abby Rockefeller thinks that relying on this type of verbal sidestep limits our ability to deal with biosolid disposal. Our reluctance to call a turd a turd makes it harder to find better ways to dispose of human waste. How can you discuss an issue if you can’t even agree on what words to use? “Shit” doesn’t pass the smell test. Euphemistic terms such as dung, scat, or excrement sound prissy and evasive. Rockefeller herself settled on “manure” because this word describes its subject clearly while alluding to its potential as fertilizer. “Dirt” does the same thing. So does “soil,” as noun and verb. Following the 2008 presidential campaign, political correspondent Jason Linkins observed that a defender of Sarah Palin’s pallid debate performance seemed to be saying, “By not soiling herself onstage, Palin was the big winner.”

  Night soil is a benign-sounding variation on this theme, as is honey, used euphemistically when referring to receptacles for human excrement. Thankfully, in developed countries anyway, few of us have need for such honey buckets or honey pots any longer. This euphemism for “chamber pot” (itself originally a euphemism) lives on in its verbal descendants go potty and potty mouth.

  The Smallest Room

  In Judges 3:24, servants of Moab’s king, Eglon, wonder why the door to his upper room is locked. They conclude that he must be relieving himself. The way this is expressed varies in different translations. These variations tell us something about changing euphemisms for defecation and the setting where it takes place.

  In the King James Bible, Eglon’s servants say of Moab’s king, “Surely he covers his feet in his summer chamber” (apparently referring to the fact that the king’s robes covered his feet when he squatted to defecate, and that his “summer chamber” was where Eglon did this). In other translations, they say:

  “Surely he is covering his feet in the upper room.”

  “He is only covering his feet in the inner chamber of the wall.”

  “He must be relieving himself in the inner room of the house.”

  “He is only relieving himself in the closet of the cool chamber.”

  “It may be that he is in his summer-house for a private purpose.”

  “Perhaps he is easing nature in his summer parlour.”

  “He might be using the latrine in the room.”

  “He must be using the toilet.”

  A
s it turns out, Eglon was indeed in what today we’d call the bathroom or the lavatory, and that was where the Israelite Ehud thrust his dagger into the vulnerable belly of Moab’s king. This wasn’t an uncommon fate for history’s monarchs. A seventeenth-century historian noted how many of them had been “slain in the draught [outhouse],” including several in Rome who were killed while seated on their “stool of ease.” Reading descriptions of such episodes provides an excellent glossary of terms used for this setting at the time of writing. According to an 1841 account, in 1016 an enemy of England’s King Edmund Ironside dispatched him with a spear while the monarch was “at the withdraught [outhouse] to purge nature.” Three centuries later, James I of Scotland was reportedly murdered while in a monastery jakes. A few decades after that, Henry III of France was said to have been stabbed in the stomach while seated on his chaise percée, an armchair with a hole in the seat and a chamber pot below. In common use during the Middle Ages among those who could afford them, this convenience spawned other euphemisms such as necessary chair, withdrawal chair, and business chair. Since so many were housed discreetly within wardrobes, go to the wardrobe became a common euphemism for calls of nature. Chaucer used the term wardrobe for the setting that he also called a pryvee.

  Privy chamber was the original designation, one that gave a touch of class to the place where private acts took place. Over time, privy chamber was condensed to privy. In his 1755 dictionary, Dr. Johnson defined “privy” as a “place of retirement” (alluding to yet another euphemism for this setting, retiring room). Early indoor privies consisted of a room barely large enough to accommodate a seat with a hole, dubbed a closet stool or close stool prior to the Elizabethan era. In a late-seventeenth-century poem Lord Rochester wrote of “Men with Close-Stools, to ease Nature.” Eventually this was shortened to stool (“I’m going to the stool”), which left that word behind for the solid waste eliminated there.