Bowling a googly ... a toilet
Photograph: Ted S Warren/AP
The reports this week about Kyra Phillips, the unfortunate CNN reporter who provided a curious background track to a presidential speech by leaving her microphone on when she went to make water, neatly illustrated two things. Firstly, it shows how many of the words for making water and for the place in which to do it are euphemistic (even the ones some people now consider vulgar), and secondly how much people - especially writers for a certain type of publication - love using the euphemisms.
The Telegraph's headline and report both played the matter fairly straight, but used the word "lavatory" - a very Telegraph word, it seems to me, avoiding the non-U "toilet", the preferred term at the more demotic Guardian.
Both words have followed a similar course, starting out by referring to personal hygiene equipment before being pulled inexorably down the pan. Toilet comes from a French derivative of "toile", a cloth. In its earliest English uses it means a small cloth for wrapping clothes in, but gradually becomes associated with personal presentation; as a small cloth used in hair-dressing, then as a cloth available on dressing tables, then the whole set of implements used in dressing and arranging one's personal appearance, and finally as a china bowl in which to piss for the edification of listening millions. Lavatory, meanwhile, from the Latin verb lavare, to wash, starts out as a vessel in which to wash oneself, and ends up as one in which you probably oughtn't.
Most US news sources, and curiously the UK's Metro, described the scene of Phillips's indiscretion as "the bathroom". In the Clarke household, however, the toilet and bathroom are separate rooms. Notwithstanding the onward march of semantic change, I continue to think of the two functions as essentially distinguishable.
The flow (if you'll excuse me) of meaning is not all one way; a few direct references to toilet functions sometimes come to have metaphorical meanings, as shown by the Mail's headline: Newsreader caught with her pants down in live broadcast.
But my favourite flourish from the press coverage is from the Telegraph, and so subtle you may think it accidental. In the (very short) report's final line, we get this gem:
Mrs Phillips, best known as a presenter of a programme called Live from ... apologised for "an issue we had with our mikes".
Indeed.
