I was helping my neighbor put new shutters on his house and to get the old ones off, we used a small pry-bar that I’ve had for years. He said he should get one of those things and I asked him if he knew what it was called. He didn’t, and I told him that it was a jimmy. (if you look up jimmy in the dictionary, it says it’s a short crowbar used by burgers.) He thought that was pretty funny.
But people’s names are used to describe all sorts of things and situations.
I guess maybe of all the names in the English language, “John” might be used the most in unflattering ways. We’ve all heard of a “Dear John Letter, an unknown dead guy is referred to as “John Doe,” and even worse, we call a bathroom the “john.”
Well, I wondered what the heck John did to deserve so much disrespect. I figured extensive research was in order….
It seems like the most common or popular explanation for why we call the bathroom the john is that it retained an association with the first name of British nobleman Sir John Harrington, who invented the flush toilet in 1596. Well that sounds reasonable, but it didn’t satisfy my extensive research. Harrington is, in fact, usually credited with devising a prototype of the flush toilet — it was not conceived by Thomas Crapper (You’ve probably heard stories about that, too, but it’s a myth.) But anyhow, the “john” moniker for the bathroom almost certainly is not related to Harrington. Here’s why (maybe.) When Harrington invented the toilet, he called it the “ajax” — a pun on the term “jakes,” that was slang for toilet at the time. And — the newfangled toilet idea never really caught on during Harrington’s lifetime. It didn’t come into widespread use until after 1775, when another British inventor, Alexander Cummings, got a patent for it. So it seems pretty unlikely that Harrington’s name would have been attached to the toilet nearly two centuries later. The term “john” as a term for the bathroom wasn’t recorded in print until the mid-18th century — nearly 150 years after Harrington’s moment of glory.
Now consider that “john” is a distinctly American term — people in Britain don’t call the bathroom the “john.” The usually call it the “W.C.” — short for “water closet.”
So even with all my extensive research, the origin of the term isn’t really clear.
I found an interesting article that indicated that the first recorded use of the term “john” to refer to the bathroom dates back to 1738 and is found in — get this — the rules that governed the actions of incoming Harvard freshmen. The rules say, “No freshman shall mingo against the College wall or go into the fellows’ cuz john.” At that time, “cuz john” was short for “cousin John,” an 18th-century American slang term for the bathroom.
Cousin John’s actual identity isn’t known, but he probably wasn’t anybody in particular. Probably, “going to visit cousin John” was a euphemism for using the bathroom — kind of like “I’m going to see a man about a dog” has been used more recently. I wasn’t familiar with the word “mingo” — it was slang for urinating. I think it’s kind of funny that the college elders at Harvard thought it was necessary to enact a rule that prohibited students from peeing on the sides of college buildings.
But — I’m not sure that college kids have changed that much — maybe the rule is needed even today…..
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