Crapper

Crapper (pronounced krap-er)

(1) A proprietary trade name for a brand of loo; toilet; lavatory etc.

(2) A slang term for the loo; toilet; lavatory etc.

1920s: The construct was crap + er.  Dating from 1375-1425, crap was from the Middle English crappe (which at various times existed in the plural as crappen, crappies and craps) (chaff; buckwheat) from the Old French crappe & crapin (chaff; siftings, waste or rejected matter).  In the Medieval Latin there were the plural forms crappa & crapinum, apparently from the Old Dutch krappen (to cut off, pluck off) from which Middle Dutch gained crappe & crap (a chop, cutlet) and Modern Dutch krip (a steak); the most obvious modern relative is crop.  The Middle English agent suffix er was from the Old English ere, from the Proto-Germanic ārijaz and generally thought to have been borrowed from the Latin ārius.  The English forms were cognate with the Dutch er & aar, the German er, the Swedish are, the Icelandic ari and the Gothic areis.  Related are the Ancient Greek ήριος (ḗrios) and the Old Church Slavonic арь (arĭ).  Although unrelated, the development of er was reinforced by the synonymous Old French or & eor and the Angle-Norman variant our, all derived from the Latin (ā)tor, the ultimate root being the primitive European tōr.  Dating from 1846, crap was the English slang for the proper term crapping ken which is crap’s first documented application to bodily waste although etymologists suspect it had been in widespread use for some time prior.  In this context, crap was used in the earlier English and French sense of “siftings, waste or rejected matter” and ken was an existing term for a small building or house.

The urban myth is part-truth, part-crap

The brand-name Crapper was first applied to a toilet designed and by plumber Thomas Crapper (1836-1910) and manufactured by the company he founded, Thomas Crapper & Co, Licenced Plumbers & Sanitary Engineers.  In 1884, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII (1841–1910; King of the UK & Emperor of India 1901-1910)) purchased Sandringham House and asked Mr Crapper to supply the plumbing, including thirty flushing loos with cedarwood seats and enclosures.  Impressed with the quality, the prince granted the company their first Royal Warrant.  The occupational surname Crapper is a dialectal variant of cropper (harvester of crops, farmer).

It’s a linguistic coincidence that a Mr Crapper choose to become a plumber and begin manufacturing loos bearing his name which bore such similarity to both crap and crapping which had earlier been used to describe bodily and other waste.  Despite being a coincidence, decades before the internet spread fake news, the urban myth was well-established that the terms words crap and crapper, in their scatological sense, all derive from the efforts and products of Mr Crapper.  The myth is often fleshed-out with reference to US soldiers stationed in England during World War One popularizing the phrase "I'm going to the crapper", after seeing the name on barracks’ cisterns.  In the way army slang does, it was taken home when the servicemen returned to the US.  Despite this, most dictionaries cite the origin of the slang term to the 1920s with popular use becoming widespread by the mid 1930s.  It spread with the empire and was noted in the era to be in use in the Indian Army although, after 1947, the troops came often to prefer "I am going to Pakistan".

By one's name, one shall be remembered.

The long-standing urban myth that Mr Crapper actually invented the flushing loo seems to lie in the 1969 book Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper by New Zealand-born humorist Wallace Reyburn (1913–2001) which purported to be a legitimate history.  Reyburn later wrote a "biography" of an influential inventor who created another product without which modern life also (for half the population) would be possible but less comfortable.  His 1971 volume Bust-Up: The Uplifting Tale of Otto Titzling and the Development of the Bra detailed the life of the putative inventor of the brassiere, Otto Titzling.  Unlike Mr Crapper, Herr Titzling (Reyburn helpfully mansplaining that the correct pronunciation was "tit-sling") never existed.  In truth, the flushing loo has probably existed in a recognizably modern form since the 1400s but, although the designs were gradually improved, they remained expensive and it was not until the nineteenth century they achieved any real popularity and it was well into the next century with the advent of distributed sanitation systems that they became expected, everyday installations.  To mark the day of his death in 1910, 27 January is designated International Thomas Crapper Day.  Each year, on that day, at the right moment, briefly, all should pause, reflect and then with gratitude, proceed.

Lindsay Lohan mug shots on the doors of the crappers at the Aqua Shard restaurant.  Located on the 31st floor of The Shard in London, the view is panoramic.