What the word toilet meant in old-time Phoenix


It's often shocking, and sometimes humorous, to see how the language has changed over the years. If you like looking at old ads, like I do, you will often see the word "toilet", which today means something that sits in your bathroom made out of porcelain. But if we time-travel a bit, and go back to old-time Phoenix (or anywhere in the United States) in 1913, the meaning is different. And once you know that, the ads don't seem quite so shocking, or as humorous.

If you were a lady of refinement in Phoenix in 1913 and walked into City Drug Store, which was on Adams at 1st Avenue, and asked for toilet water, the owner of the store wouldn't just point you to the bathroom where his dog might be having a drink. No, toilet water would have been a nice-smelling perfumed water, manufactured by Palmer, Colgate, Roger & Gallet, Pinaud, Pivier, Hanbigant, or Guerlain. Speaking for myself, I'd probably go with something French-sounding, probably not Colgate.

And that would go for anything that was labelled toilet, including powders, creams, soaps, brushes and combs. Because toilet was a polite term that referred to a place where a lady (or a gentleman) would get all cleaned up, hair nicely combed, smelling good, that sort of thing. Far from being a slightly obscene word, it was a fussy word. The butler might say, "Pardon, but madam is attending to her toilet, and will be right down." And when she greeted her guests, she would be beautiful and all gussied up, not wearing rubber gloves and smelling slightly of bleach.

Times change, and the way that we use words does, too.

Image at the top of this post: Ad for toilet articles available at the City Drug Store in 1913, Adams and 1st Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona.

 If you liked this article, and would like to see more in the future, please consider becoming a patron of History Adventuring on Patreon. If you're already a patron, thank you! Your pledge makes this happen!

 Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more