To think toilet sounds better than loo?

[Mabelthebore]

& dessert sounds nicer than pudding? I know some people look down on those who say toilet and dessert but I actually think they sound nicer. I think loo in particular is a horrible word.

In our house it is definitely

Loo
Pudding
Sofa
Jam
Bike
Vegetables

I saw a sign in a tube station about storing your "cycles" the other day and winced. My dad is very non-u and would say toilet, dessert, settee, greens etc.

All young people now just say "I need to go for a wee"

TMI

Ugh, I hate 'wee'. DH says it, always makes me cringe.

Corrr... A sweet trolley! They were a thing of joy, weren't they? Profiteroles, chocolate gateau, oranges in caramel..

I would have got properly stuck in…

I wonder if all these words started out as a polite euphemism along the lines of restroom but because its so obvious it means only one thing it's become the standard word and further euphemisms were then needed.

Toilet originally meant getting ready in general as used in Eau-de-toilet. I remember a now funny line in a Georgette Heyer novel about the ladies and gentlemen at a ball in their grand toilets.

Lavatory, as someone pointed out upthread, originally meant washroom. I don't know about Loo but personally I was under the impression that this was just an informal shortening of Lavatory however I may be wrong.

Interesting, though, about “ the place” as apparently one theory for the origin of “ loo” is from the French “ le lieu”: the place. So maybe “ the place” was a word for it at sone point …

… and just to add, now I’m thinking about it, the irony in that theory would be that “ toilet” is seen as naff because it’s a purloining of the French word to give it a certain “je ne sais quoi” in the minds of those who thought it was posh to pepper their speech with a little bit of foreign and “ loo” is more self-assured “U” because it isn’t trying to impress. Yet if “le lieu” is the origin of loo, it turns out loo is also, when stripped back to its origins, nothing more than a bit of franglais.

I thought that “loo” came from the French phrase “garde l’eau” which people apparently shouted as a warning when emptying their chamber pot out of a window.

It’s hard to think of a word for toilet that isn’t a euphemism (everything from words related to washing to twee phrases such as “powder room” or “little girls’ room”) or a dysphemism, such as “bog”, “shitter” or “crapper”.

Better than a pupil of mine (year 8) who announced he really needed a poo. In front of the whole class. He put his hand up to tell me too. Bless him. Class were silent when he said it, they didn't know how to react. Just not something you tell a class of 30!

loo and pudding for me (NZ)

I always say toilet and pudding. Dessert sounds posh but as we don't have pudding at home I don't use the word often.
Don't care what other people say.

"Lavatory"/"loo" used fairly interchangeably but we probably say "loo" more, and always "pudding". My mother used to watch me like a hawk for any rogue "serviettes", "lounges" or "settees" as well when I was small.

"Toilet" enforced by a school would be a hill I'd die on, too. As would "pardon". It is always "what".

Lavatory is correct, as is pudding
Toilet and dessert/pudding are middle-class affectations, along with fish-knives!

No, definitely loo over toilet. Traditionally loo was deemed posher than toilet (don’t shoot the messenger). Likewise in theory, pudding is posher than dessert.

I say loo and dessert

Loo, from the French l'eau - water, and pudding but not together, thanks. Thinking about it, all our loo related words derive from the French - lavatory from lavage, toilet from toilette, loo as above. The only one we seem to own is Crapper, named after the chap who designed the flushing water closet.

@newnamethanks , lavatory is from the Latin lavatorium.

Thank you pedant, it's always useful to have the blindingly obvious clearly underlined.

You're welcome, @newnamethanks .

@PedantScorner I said upthread about how I sometimes say "Lavatorium" - I didn't realise it was actually Latin.
I thought I had made it up 😂😂

I think lavatory is in fact from Latin more than French and as I understand it there is no consensus about loo.

But the reason we have so many borrowed words is that for a long time French was considered to deal with things more delicately. I’m not sure it did really, and it was more just that it was foreign, so less obvious to English ears. But there’s lots of French words and names that sound sophisticated to our ears but are actually very down to earth and basic. Think Mount Blanc.

English working class household. We were brought up using dessert, toilet or loo, and serviette, not that we often used them!

I've never heard anyone irl say lavatory.

Bog was used too, much to my mum's horror.

It's funny that us commoners are looked down on for using French words to sound "posher", when it's clear from these threads that the middle classes are obsessed with avoiding Non U terms. Unless of course everyone here is genuinely upper class, something tells me that's very unlikely however.

It’s going to depend a lot on what terms you grew up with. My parents thoroughly disliked ‘toilet’ - we had to say ‘lavatory’ but I hated that (connotations of freezing cold loos and hard paper) so once into teens it was always ‘loo’ and has been ever since.

And ‘dessert’ instead of ‘pudding’, was considered (sorry!) somewhat ‘lower class’ in our house, along with net curtains and ‘serviettes’.

That’s a bit what I was thinking too - most of all I was thinking that it was quite “ over-involved” of Nancy Mitford to even put own to paper on it, given the “ U” thing to do was not try overly hard!