Toilet vs. Commode

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Elaine Lewis. I’m calling from Redlands, California, and I’m curious about the explanation for these two words, commode and toilet.

I married a Yankee, and I’m from East Tennessee, and I had always and only ever used the word commode for the fixture in the bathroom where you sit. And my husband, being from Ohio, only used the word toilet. But to us, a toilet was an outhouse. So I had a very difficult time making the transition to using the word toilet.

Why did he win? Well, I was a little embarrassed because he had been around the country more than I had been. And I thought, maybe I’ve been misusing it all these years. So I deferred to what he calls it.

No, you’re fine using commode for this. Well, if you’re in the South, you are.

Yeah. I called my brother who travels the world, and I said, have you ever heard the word commode used outside the Southeast part of the United States? And he said, no, he always refers to it as the toilet when he travels.

Oh, really? Oh, that’s interesting. And everyone knows what he’s talking about.

Right. Does he use it for the fixture itself and the room? Well, he just refers to the room, but my husband only referred to it, I guess, the room and the fixture.

Oh, this is really interesting stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there’s some stuff falling into place here, like it’s a puzzle going together in my mind.

Indeed. I would love to know the origin of the word. I mean, I’m sure it’s actually called a commode in some parts of the world and the United States, but I don’t know where the real difference is.

Yeah, we used commode growing up in Kentucky. And what was really funny was that the term commode in other parts of the country often refers to a kind of cabinet or dresser.

Right. And I remember my mother bought us a piece of furniture. It was about two feet high, and it was an octagonal table, and it had little shelves. And it was called by the furniture manufacturer a commode. And this caused no end of hilarity in our house.

How old were you? About 12. Okay, okay. I would come home and say, Mom, I got my report card, and I would say, I left it in the commode, and everybody would go, it’s so funny.

Well, for sure, you didn’t want to refer to going to the toilet, because in the South, everybody thought you went to the outhouse, and no one wanted to be accused of going to the outhouse, especially when indoor bathrooms came into being.

Right, right. That is true. Yeah, in some parts of the South, the outhouse is the toilet building.

I didn’t know that. I had family with outhouses well into the 80s, and I don’t remember what they called it, but I don’t think it was toilet. I think we called it an outhouse. I mean, my father’s people in the hills of North Carolina.

Yeah. Outdoor toilet and outhouse were synonymous. But the history of commode, how do you go, Martha, from the piece of furniture to the piece of porcelain?

Well, the piece of furniture got transferred to the idea of putting something around the place where all the business gets done, the chamber pot. And, of course, this caused no end of hilarity a few years ago when we had our representative, Randy Cunningham, who purchased two commodes for a cost of $7,200.

Which commode? Well, you would think it would be this gold-plated throne, you know, in the bathroom, but it was the other kind of commode. They’re a little like an armoire, right?

You mean… The commode, the wooden thing, not the porcelain thing. Yeah, yeah, very small, but it’s a place for the chamber pot originally. So you could have a piece of furniture called a commode with or without the chamber pot. Some of them had the chamber pot.

Once you’ve got a bathroom in the house, moved into that room, right, which the room itself was called the toilet. Yeah. The toilet then applied to the…

Yeah, moving on up in the world with a commode. Complicated. So you’re fine calling it a commode.

Okay, I’ll go back to that. You know, it’s funny. There are people in Ohio and some of the eastern states who say commode as well. It’s mostly Southern, but there are little sprinkles of people around the rest of the country who also say commode.

No pun intended. Oh, we can’t have this conversation with a straight face, can we? Well, you can imagine that was not the only word we had to decode the language on.

Oh, I bet. A lot of arm wrestling in your house, huh? Elaine, you’ll have to call again with those.

I will. Thank you so much. Okay. Thanks, Elaine. Bye. Bye.

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