My immediate thought was that I had had a shower this morning. I wondered if that was good enough. And why would I need a bath at 50,000 feet?

Why have people started talking about  bathroom when they want to use the lavatory?

The trend started in the USA but has now extended to Australia.

I often use the word loo. I don’t mind saying I have never used the word bathroom to describe the place where I go to escape the troubles of the world.

A few people have suggested it comes from a word of warning in a foreign country after things were thrown out the window. Some say servicemen picked up the expression during World War 1.

Bathroom is described as a place equipped with a bath or shower. Going to the bathroom is another way of saying something like “I need to urinate or defecate”.

In the USA bathroom can be used as another word for lavatory and apparently this meaning is extending to Australia, but my impression is that the use of bathroom is among people who find some embarrassment at using the word lavatory.

The word lavatory goes back several hundred years. Originally it meant a place for washing but over the years became a euphemism for toilet, or loo. A comment as recently as 1967 said “loo is holding its own fairly well and most of toilet’s gains have been at the expense of lavatory”.

People have said to me “I would never use the word lavatory”. Some people see offence in using the word toilet. Loo is used by those people who see no offence in anything.

Bathroom is used by those people who seek to avoid giving offence or even by people who seek to maintain their genteel status.

This word loo, so I discovered, has several meanings and in some cases these meanings don’t derive from the same source - whatever that source might be. It can be used to describe a card game, it is used by some people as an abbreviation for halloo, it is the name of several towns, it is a covering for the faces of some women, it has been used as a word to describe a dust-laden wind, it is used as a form of love and it is used to incite a dog to the chase. I don’t think I have ever used loo in any of the above senses.

But the use of the word to describe a lavatory goes back only a few years.

James Joyce in Ulysses, published in 1922, referred to loo without using the word when he described a water closet. But the word was used only as few years later, in 1932 by Nancy Mitford in Christmas Pudding. In 1943 Cecil Beaton said some people had dressed, brushed their teeth “and visited the loo”.

From there, use of the word became commonplace.

Too common for some people.

They now use the word bathroom.

But whenever I hear the word bathroom, I think of some person having a bath at 50,000 feet.

It almost gives a new meaning to the mile high club.

lauriebarber.com; lbword@midcoast.com.au