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\u2019ve 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\u2019t, and I told him that it was a jimmy. (if you look up jimmy in the dictionary, it says it\u2019s a short crowbar used by burgers.) He thought that was pretty funny. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But people\u2019s names are used to describe all sorts of things and situations.
I guess maybe of all the names in the English language, \u201cJohn\u201d might be used the most in unflattering ways. We\u2019ve all heard of a \u201cDear John Letter, an unknown dead guy is referred to as \u201cJohn Doe,\u201d and even worse, we call a bathroom the \u201cjohn.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well, I wondered what the heck John did to deserve so much disrespect. I figured extensive research was in order\u2026. I found an interesting article that indicated that the first recorded use of the term \u201cjohn\u201d to refer to the bathroom dates back to 1738 and is found in \u2014 get this \u2014 the rules that governed the actions of incoming Harvard freshmen. The rules say, \u201cNo freshman shall mingo against the College wall or go into the fellows\u2019 cuz john.\u201d At that time, \u201ccuz john\u201d was short for \u201ccousin John,\u201d an 18th-century American slang term for the bathroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cousin John\u2019s actual identity isn\u2019t known, but he probably wasn\u2019t anybody in particular. Probably, \u201cgoing to visit cousin John\u201d was a euphemism for using the bathroom \u2014 kind of like \u201cI\u2019m going to see a man about a dog\u201d has been used more recently. I wasn\u2019t familiar with the word \u201cmingo\u201d \u2014 it was slang for urinating. I think it\u2019s 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. 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\u2019ve had for years. He said he should get one of those things and I asked … Continue reading
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\u2019t satisfy my extensive research. Harrington is, in fact, usually credited with devising a prototype of the flush toilet \u2014 it was not<\/em> conceived by Thomas Crapper (You\u2019ve probably heard stories about that, too, but it\u2019s a myth.) But anyhow, the \u201cjohn\u201d moniker for the bathroom almost certainly is not related to Harrington.\u00a0 Here\u2019s why (maybe.) When Harrington invented the toilet, he called it the \u201cajax\u201d \u2014 a pun on the term \u201cjakes,\u201d that was slang for toilet at the time. And \u2014 the newfangled toilet idea never really caught on during Harrington\u2019s lifetime. It didn\u2019t 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\u2019s name would have been attached to the toilet nearly two centuries later. The term \u201cjohn\u201d as a term for the bathroom wasn\u2019t recorded in print until the mid-18th century \u2014 nearly 150 years after Harrington\u2019s moment of glory.
Now consider that \u201cjohn\u201d is a distinctly American term \u2014 people in Britain don\u2019t call the bathroom the \u201cjohn.\u201d The usually call it the \u201cW.C.\u201d \u2014 short for \u201cwater closet.\u201d
So even with all my extensive research, the origin of the term isn\u2019t really clear.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But \u2014 I\u2019m not sure that college kids have changed that much \u2014 maybe the\u00a0 rule is needed even today\u2026..
\u2014 30 \u2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"