"Commode"

[Paul Johnston]

My parents had a "commode" which was a small chest of drawers==pr rather, it had one drawer.  It wasn't a toilet.

Paul Johnston
On Mar 29, 2011, at 6:09 PM, victor steinbok wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       victor steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Commode"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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