I was just standing there minding my own business, when the thought struck me. Just what IS the deal with that dog? Or horse? And exactly who’s the shady figure behind the deal?
The Interwebs took some convincing before it would help at all. I KNOW the computer has done a lot to speed up research, but I still resent all the time I spend explaining to AI that I really wanted to look up something entirely other. Information on how James Abram Garfield got involved in the question was simply hopeless.
What I NEEDED was a simple Dictionary of Euphemisms, so I could track down a few phrases I had run into over the years for having to leave the room to pee. Okay, to urinate. (Talk about uphemisms.) The whole business, in one form or another, has been confusing me since I was a child and read Gulliver’s Travels, wherein there is a highly important turn of the plot in which Lemuel Gulliver saves the day by “making water”. This was NOT a phrase used in the Midwest in the 1960s, and the whole thing went over my head (as, indeed, it did for the Lilliputians.) My brain also somehow failed to make a connection of similar import when one of the boys in A Child’s Christmas In Wales suggests writing something in the snow.
But I had no desire to track every single expression for going wee-wee. NOR did I need synonyms for the potty itself. ALL I wanted to know was the story behind certain phrases which signified “’Scuse me. Gots to go to the Little Boys’ Room and moisten the necessary.” And this simple inquiry…never mind. Let us hurry, like the gentleman who just spoke, to the desired denouement.
“I’m going to go shed a tear for Garfield”: This came at me from a book published in the 1950s, so it has nothing to do with large orange cats. I was able to find “shed a tear” as a popular phrase for the function, but data stopped right there. The author of the book lived in southern California and Texas, so perhaps the 20th President had some special significance there.
“I want to spend a penny”: Correctly used, in its native Britain, this should be employed only by women, as it relates to Victorian pay toilets, which required a big copper coin to use. MEN did not have this expense, which is less a matter of evil patriarchy as a matter of form following function. As pointed out by literary scholar Gail Kern Paster’s “Leaky Vessels”, men do have a simpler time of it: any handy wall will do. Ladies, requiring a door due to a more vulnerable position…you get eh idea, don’t you? And I complain because I have to pay for television programs I used to watch free.
“I’ve got to go see a man about a dog” (or horse): Or even a duck, according to a couple of Online Oexperts. This is not as specific as other phrases, as it is usually translated as “I’m going someplace for reasons I don’t care to explain”, and MAY have originally meant you were leaving to pay the money you lost on a horse race or a dog race. (But then why a duck? Why a no chicken?) Wikipedia claims that in some parts of the United States, the phrase varies depending on what you are going to do in the restroom, with seeing a man about a dog taking less time than seeing a man about a horse.
That was about where I decided there were other things I could be doing with my time (no, oddly enough, not for THAT reason.) And, anyway, I was not all that curious about the fairly simple stories behind “I need to powder my nose”, “I must answer the call of nature”, Percy and the porcelain, the wife’s best friend. I will lift my mind from the, um, gutter, and go peruse Ogden Nash’s romance about the young lady whose life changed when she was visiting a nobleman’s castle, asked for the Little Girl’s Room, and was directed by a hard-of-hearing servant to the Earl’s Room. There are plot points in that one which have always worried me.
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