"Commode"

[victor steinbok]

I really would not be able to describe the use as "uncommon" as I
heard it fairly frequently when interacting with large numbers of
students in the Midwest as recently as three years ago. It does not
appear in print quite as frequently. Not sure about TV and film--I
have not been looking at film language from a researcher's perspective
until recently.

But I can describe one humorous moment. When Duke Cunningham was
indicted on corruption charges, the main driving force behind the case
was a local San Diego newspaper and Josh Marshall at TPM. At one
point, Josh was reviewing a DoJ inventory of Cunningham's possessions
that were subject to forfeiture and one item was an antique "commode".
Josh expressed considerable puzzlement over it, as he could not
understand why anyone would buy an old toilet (an extension of OED's
4. that is not covered in that definition, incidentally). It took a
few hours and some correspondence with others for Josh to get to what
would have been obvious to many ESL people for whom the primary use of
commode might have been "a chest of drawers", a piece of furniture
(OED's 3.). In fact, that's exactly what it turned out to be.

I do wonder how the tag came to be applied to such diverse items. But,
looking at the OED definitions, the original toilet-related commode
was the close-stool. Toilet proper came much later and the meaning
likely was just transferred to the porcelain version. And closestool,
as a piece of furniture, is much closer to a chest of drawers than a
toilet.

VS-)

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 3:57 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The voiceover to a commercial for Clorox Toilet-Bowl Cleaner includes
> _commode_ first in its list of synonyms for "toilet." It must be over
> sixty years, since I last heard the word so used. Or used at all, for
> that matter. Even in Saint Louis BE, the word on the street was
> "toilet."
>
> --
> -Wilson

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