by Geoffrey Churchman

Although I’m not a fan generally of TV commercials, a current exception is the one for telco 2^o which has a small group trekking up a mountain to visit a local who happens to be sitting in an outhouse at the summit, or as they are called in A/NZ, a dunny. A knock on the door results in a response of ‘occupied’. I have seen calendars devoted to the subject of rural dunnies and there is a joke about banging like a dunny door in the wind.

The more common slang used widely in the UK and NZ is ‘the loo’ which is perhaps an anglicisation of French le lieu (‘the place’), or maybe Waterloo.

In Europe the standard term for a unisex toilet is Water Closet, always shortened to W.C. and pronounced ‘vay say’.

When I first went to America I quickly learned the equivalent is ‘the john’, although it’s not as common as loo is in Britain.

Of course there are other terms, particularly in the UK — ‘the bog’, ‘throne room’, ‘privvy’, ‘can’, ‘khazi’, ‘drop zone’.

My favourite Te Reo word is ‘wharepaku’ which literally means small house.

In Denmark ‘bog’ means a book — here book and idea — and a ‘boghandel’ is a bookshop, but for Brits it must also suggest something else. 🙂