Thursday 18 October 2012

Toilet language

This sign is in the toilet near my office:



It describes the toilet as 'communal'. Nothing wrong with that; communal means shared by members of a community. But somehow it just makes me think of us all using it at the same time, like a communal changing room.

5 comments:

  1. Is it because toilet is commonly used to mean both the toilet itself and the room it's in? The ambiguity could be sidestepped with the phrase "communal bathroom", and I wouldn't end up picturing a dozen people sitting blithely on a giant toilet seat. :-)

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  2. Actually, in this case the distinction doesn't really exist. In general, yes, I think that would make a difference (although calling public toilets a 'bathroom' would sound weirdly American to me - not to you?). However, this particular toilet is literally just a toilet in a cupboard. It's smaller than many toilet cubicles I've been in.

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  3. Hmm. In that case maybe changing communal to unisex would be better, since it conveys the same information but doesn't have communcal's connotations of group activity. I don't know how commonly unisex is used in such a context, though.

    Calling public toilets a "bathroom" doesn't sound American to me, no. I'm from the west of Ireland, but I don't know if that has anything to do with it.

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  4. Mm. 'Unisex' doesn't quite seem right either because the important point is not that both sexes will be using it - we could all be female (or all male) and the point would remain. I think if I was rewriting it I'd go with 'shared' and leave it at that.

    To me, 'bathroom' implies a place where you can wash and have a shower and stuff. I might ask in someone's house 'where's the bathroom' without implying that I was going to have a shower, but it would be because I would expect the toilet to be in the bathroom. (And then if it was separate, I'd be scuppered.) But not public toilets. I don't know if being from the west of Ireland has anything to do with it either - I know shamefully little about the dialect there.

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  5. Yes, for us toilet is the actual facility, never the room, which is a rest room in a public place and a bathroom in a house. (The claim that we call them comfort stations is just slander.)

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