Mind your language
MR HUGH Montgomery-Massingberd has politely put me in my place, which is easy enough, and Nancy Mitford at the same time, which is more of an achieve- ment.
It is all about lavatories, or more par- ticularly lavatory paper. I had pointed out that toilet paper had been cate- gorised as non-U and lavatory paper as U, in the book Noblesse Oblige. Mr Massingberd, as he economically calls himself for journalistic purposes, notes that this is a false distinction based on etymological confusion.
In the 19th century, before anyone had thought of calling a privy a toilet, toilet paper referred to paper used for hair-curling and so on. This usage is indeed recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary in a citation from 1884, in an advertisement in the Stationers' and Booksellers' Journal for 'an attractively put-up packet of toilet paper'. The ideal gift.
Mr Massingberd counts the U identi- fication of lavatory paper among those which are 'far from being universal to the aristocracy; in fact one would sus- pect them of being merely the personal preferences of Nancy Mitford and her immediate circle'.
As for lavatory, it has had a nobler history than being one of many euphemisms for the jakes. Wyclif in his translation of the Bible renders Exodus mac 18: 'And thou shalt make a brasun lavatory with his foot to wasshe with.' Ecclesiastical ablutions were also in the mind of the 15th-century compiler of the Lay Folks Mass Book, in the rubric that says: 'When the preste gothe to the lavatori'. But by 1839, when Longfellow wrote Hyperion, I think he might have thought twice before writing the line: 'On a lavatory, below, sat a cherub.' In any case one has, after all, to call the room and its fittings something. It is agreeable to rest comfortable in the knowledge that the best-bred dukes call out to their retainers: 'There's no toilet paper in the lavatory!'
Dot Wordsworth
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