Scot Dutchy wrote:Plenty of large houses often had a toilet at the back of the cloakroom.

Just why is it called a 'restroom'?

Because you take a relaxing seat.

Corneel wrote:

Scot Dutchy wrote:Plenty of large houses often had a toilet at the back of the cloakroom.

Just why is it called a 'restroom'?

Because you take a relaxing seat.

What is relaxing about heaving?

Shitting is awesome.

But not relaxing.

It is for me. Maybe I'm just better at it than other people.

Oh yes.

Not much better than a satisfying dump, that's a fact.

lofuji wrote:Where I am (Hong Kong), it's a sai sow fong (wash hands room) if you want to be genteel, but a chee saw (the bogs) if you're like me. Incidentally, every village in the New Territories has a public toilet, but there is one that I cycle through quite often that has three! I can't remember its name, because I always refer to it as "three chee saw village".

Yeah, in Japan the signage you see for the bogs is usually 手洗い　(手Te = hand 洗い Arai = wash)
Then sometimes they render the English word 'Toilet' into the Japanese transliteration using the Katakana syllabary トイレット
( Toi Re:to) (Words in Japanese must end with a vowel, apart from 'N',)
The casual and vulgar word for the place, equivalent to 'bog' is the word 便所 (Benjyo) which literally translates as 'Convenient Place.' Doesn't seem too vulgar to me but there you go...different cultures have very different ways.

On the topic of bogs and shitting, I have this on my Amazon list at the moment.
https://www.amazon.com/Fecal-Matters-Early-Modern-Literature/dp/0754641163

From the blurb:

"Feces, urine, flatus, phlegm, vomitus - unlike ourselves, our most educated forebears did not disdain these functions, and, further, they employed scatological references in all manner of works. This collection of essays was provoked by what its editors considered to be a curious lacuna: the relative academic neglect of the copious and ubiquitous scatological rhetoric of Early Modern Europe, here broadly defined as the representation of the process and product of elimination of the body's waste products. The contributors to this volume examine the many forms and functions of scatology as literary and artistic trope, and reconsider this last taboo in the context of Early Modern European expression. They address unflinchingly both the objective reality of the scatological as part and parcel of material culture - inescapably a much larger part, a much heavier parcel then than now - and the subjective experience of that reality among contemporaries."

Temporarily out of stock, but I'll be getting it as soon as it becomes available.

If you have ever read Rabelais you will recall the scatological delight of that author.
In a protracted section, there is a discussion on what the best arse wiping resource is. (This was in the days before tissue paper..)
The conclusion reached is that the best thing to wipe yourself on is a goose's neck!

To which I can only observe...scary buggers, geese.