Potty Mouth
Slate.com has an occasional column called "Human Guinea Pig", in which Emily Yoffe, who's much braver than I am, does things just to see what it would be like: enters a beauty pageant and an eating competition (not at the same time, obviously), learns how to fool a lie detector, becomes a nude artists' model. It's all here, and all well worth your time; she's a terrific writer.
In the most recent installment, she uses the word "commode" twice:
...if you were a defense industry lobbyist, you'd give a congressman a $7,200 Louis-Philippe commode and the Pentagon contract would be yours.
But what if you want to be a lobbyist and you've never played a round of golf, the only season tickets you have are to a children's puppet theater, and your commodes are all American Standard and bolted to your bathroom floor?
Nothing wrong with it, of course, but I naturally wondered how "commode" could have come to mean "toilet". It's related to the words "commodious" ("roomy, spacious") and "incommodate/incommode", ("disturb, inconvenience"), neither of which seems to have much if anything to do with a toilet.
But it all makes perfect sense once you realize that "commode" comes from Latin "commodus", "convenient", and what could be more convenient than not having to go outside to do your business? (And finally, to tie it all together, I remembered that in England, "convenience" is yet another euphemism for "toilet" or "lavatory", which is itself a euphemism, being a pretty exact translation of "washroom", a standard North American euphemism for the same thing.)
"Commode", since you have to have been wondering by now, is from the usual Latin prefix "com-", "together, with" plus "-modus", "measure", which is also the source of "commodity", something which has been judged to be useful. And "convenience", since we're there anyway, is also from Latin "com-" plus "-venire", "to come"; its source, "convenire", meant "to be suitable for", which is to say "something in which everything has come together", which certainly applies to something convenient. (It's intimately related to "convene", which also means "come together", in a somewhat different manner.)
In the most recent installment, she uses the word "commode" twice:
...if you were a defense industry lobbyist, you'd give a congressman a $7,200 Louis-Philippe commode and the Pentagon contract would be yours.
But what if you want to be a lobbyist and you've never played a round of golf, the only season tickets you have are to a children's puppet theater, and your commodes are all American Standard and bolted to your bathroom floor?
Nothing wrong with it, of course, but I naturally wondered how "commode" could have come to mean "toilet". It's related to the words "commodious" ("roomy, spacious") and "incommodate/incommode", ("disturb, inconvenience"), neither of which seems to have much if anything to do with a toilet.
But it all makes perfect sense once you realize that "commode" comes from Latin "commodus", "convenient", and what could be more convenient than not having to go outside to do your business? (And finally, to tie it all together, I remembered that in England, "convenience" is yet another euphemism for "toilet" or "lavatory", which is itself a euphemism, being a pretty exact translation of "washroom", a standard North American euphemism for the same thing.)
"Commode", since you have to have been wondering by now, is from the usual Latin prefix "com-", "together, with" plus "-modus", "measure", which is also the source of "commodity", something which has been judged to be useful. And "convenience", since we're there anyway, is also from Latin "com-" plus "-venire", "to come"; its source, "convenire", meant "to be suitable for", which is to say "something in which everything has come together", which certainly applies to something convenient. (It's intimately related to "convene", which also means "come together", in a somewhat different manner.)
posted by pyramus | 10:58 AM
1 Comments:
Well, that is fascinating: I'd never heard of the measure before. But it's no surprise, since "modus" does, after all, mean "measure", so why shouldn't it have given its name to a specific measure?
"Modus" didn't just mean "measure" specifically; it also had sideways meanings such as "limit" and "manner", which led to such words as "mode" (as in "a la mode", "in the manner of") and "modernity" ("the manner of the current time"), not to mention "modest", "moderate", "modify", and many, many other "mod-" words.
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