CHIPS OFF THE OLD BLOCK

Recently, I read that a city in Washington has paved sidewalks with a concrete mix containing crushed toilets. The city calls the mix "Poticrete." The toilets were repurposed from retrofitted residential housing authority buildings.*

The story provoked my thinking about toilets. For example, why are almost all toilets white? Most cars today are said to be white because they are more readily seen. Dinnerware frequently is white to better show off food. So, why are toilets white? Of course, in the 60s and 70s, toilets often came in colors, such as blue, yellow and brown-what were they intended to show?

Toilets can differ in ways other than color. An outhouse has only a cutout in a board, crawling with spiders and other varmints. In Europe, they seem to have devices where one cannot find the flush handle. In Russia, the toilet can be only a hole in the floor surrounded by dazzling mosaic tiles. In the United States, modern toilets seem more like hungry shop vacs.

Something I have pondered for years: why are rooms with toilets called "restrooms?" Does anyone actually go to a restroom to rest? I did work one summer as a student for a company where some employees often went to a restroom to sleep in a stall to avoid working. Increased incidents of hemorrhoids were reported.

In Europe, restrooms often are called "water closets." But, they are not closets at all, and toilets are rarely found in closets. There was one exception, We once stayed in an apartment in a central European city, where the toilet was in a tiny closet--a fact which I discovered when I inadvertently opened the closet door to hang a coat on the nose of the occupant.

Why are toilets called toilets? Why are they sometimes called "stools?" Webster's dictionary provides a definition of "stool" as "a seat used as a symbol of office or authority." There may be a political meaning somewhere in that.

Another perplexing thing is toilet water. We flush toilets to dispose of toilet water. But when we call it "eau de toilette" we pour it on our bodies.

Old toilets may become remnants of civilization's history. Long in the future, archaeologists may be studying pieces of concrete with chips of toilet--like fossils of early, extinct life--trying to figure out what devices called toilets were. Maybe they were some sort of calendars, or storage vessels or cooking implements, they may speculate. Or, maybe they simply were the thrones of great leaders.
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*(Water Environment & Technology magazine, May, 2012, P.31)