Bathroom Reading

Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body?— Matthew 15:17

The wiser course would undoubtedly have been to admit its existence and to dignify it as much as its nature will allow.— Sigmund Freud, preface to John G. Bourke’s Scatalogic Rites of All Nations

We are taught from an early age that going to the lavatory is a private affair. For the actual purpose of the room, there are many names: we refer to washing, bathing, resting, or powdering to skirt the business at hand. And here, of course, is another bit of avoidance: “doing one’s business.” There is also “the call of nature,” “talking to a man about a horse,” and a whole host of cruder, even violent terms. Perhaps we should make like the child in Dr. Seuss’s Halloween Is Grinch Night and go instead “to the euphemism.” While...