Last week, the New York Times announced it was making all the content on its website free. Whereas once you had to pay to access articles dating back to the paper’s founding in 1851, now this trove of history and knowledge is accessible to anyone with a login and password.
Login: poopreport. Password: poopreport. You can use that ID to follow in my steps, because the first thing I did when I heard their announcement was to search for the Times’ first use of the word “poop.”
The results weren’t as fulfilling as my research into the first appearance of the word “poop” on the Internet, which led me to identify (and interview!) the Internet’s first PoopReporter: Tom Reingold, who described his changing needs for bathroom privacy on the misc.kids newsgroup. But most early references to poop on the Times (like this one, for instance) refer to “poop decks” (which, in spite of what we may think, are actually standard features in naval architecture). This appears to be the case on September 24, 1851, in an article entitled “MARINE INTELLIGENCE.; PORT OF NEW-YORK. Cleared. Arrived. Telegraph Domestic Ports. Spoken, &c.”
“Marine intelligence”, I take it, refers to the comings and goings of various boats into and out of New York Harbor; this passage reports that the Argo, from Liverpool, arrived on the 20th of August, 1851, carrying 81 people in the poop deck.
I assume that most of the appearances of “poop” in the years that followed are similar. But the Times only allows you to download a PDF scan of the article, instead of letting you browse the digitize text rather than browsing the digitized text; so with no find function, it would take forever to go through each article to find out when “poop” is first discussed in a non-sailing context.
Outside of sailing, the only major appearances I could find were due to scanning errors. For instance, here is an article that appeared on February 4, 1923:
Nothing bathroom-related about that. But in the search results, that headline is rendered thusly:
This article, from April 10, 1879, came across as “poop” in the search results; I can’t tell if it’s a scanning error or not.
Some other notable New York Times milestones.
July 13, 1969: the first appearance of “feces”, in a book review. (”If you value your digestion and peace of mind, read no further. We’re going to be talking about fleas and feces.”)
October 29, 1851: the first appearance of “toilet”, in a list of award winners at the Industrial Exhibition of 1851. (”Hauel, J…… toilet soaps.”)
Dec 12, 1851: the first appearance of the phrase “water closet”, in testimony offered by Pugh Smith during the trial of Lawrence Reily for the murder of his wife and his wife’s mother. (”When the dinner was ready, I found Reily in the water closet, asleep; the door was fastened on the inside.”)
September 20, 1851: the first appearance of the word “diarrhea”, in a report on the health of President Millard Fillmore. (”I have just left the President. He has suffered considerably during the night and morning from an attack of diarrhea and stomach derangement, similar to his attack, recently, at White Sulphur Springs, and brought on by change of water, cold and fatigue.”)
July 15, 1888: the first appearance of the phrase “toilet paper”, in a trial following a hazing scandal at the Annapolis Naval Academy. (”He is charged with requiring Cadets Davidson and Stockford to chew their toilet paper.”)
December 3, 1856: the first appearance of the word “excreta”, in a report on findings presented at the Horticultural Society. (”In passing through animal bodies, as part of themselves and not as excreta, mineral materials acquire a modification which renders them better fitted for similar and further uses.”)
December 25, 1852: the first appearance of the word “bathroom”. (It’s somewhere in a 5,000 word article; with a lack of a search function, I’m sure as hell not going to go searching for it.)
Google News appears to have indexed the Times archive; searching there is more fruitful because they, at least, show the keyword as it appears in context. It’s not a bad interface, so maybe one of you will have more luck finding “poop” as we now know it.
The UN has declared 2008 to be the International Year of Sanitation. Their intention is to jumpstart lagging efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals for hygiene, household sanitation, and wastewater — goals that include reducing by half the 2.6 billion people who don’t have access to basic sanitation.
But sanitation isn’t like AIDS or malnutrition — it’s an issue that is at once both deadly serious and kinda hilarious. That’s not just my opinion — those confronting the issue know that humor is as much a part of the cause as activism. And far from relying on somber recitations of statistics, sanitation advocates are embracing humor to get their message across.
“We need to make toilets and sanitation sexy,” says World Toilet Organization president Jack Sim. “We’re planning to ask all politicians to take pictures next to toilets. I think 2008 is our great chance to influence the minds of our politicians and leaders.”
That’s a great idea. But it’s a good thing it’s not happening until 2008, because right now isn’t quite the right time for politicians to pose in poopers. A headline from today’s New York Times: Fateful Bathroom Draws Crowds of the Curious.
The bathroom in question, of course, is Larry Craig’s. “Since Aug. 27,” reports The Times, “when the arrest of Mr. Craig became known publicly, the restroom has become a source of amusement for travelers and employees at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Some pose for pictures before the outer door. Others enter to zoom in on the light-blue stall the senator used, the eighth of nine in a row. The undercover officer who arrested Mr. Craig was in the stall to his right, the seventh stall.”
The behavior of these tourists prove that Jack Sim has it exactly right: nothing gets the public’s attention like toilets. By the time 2008 rolls around, the toe-tapping associations will have faded from our minds, and pictures of senators with shitters will be useful in calling attention to the serious issues that need addressing.
In the meantime, I’ll be in that airport in two weeks. You bet I’ll be taking a picture.
To many of us, handicapped stalls are the most glorious achievement in restroom architecture: an area more spacious than most New York City apartments, hand bars for when you really need to bear down, and a mild taboo against use by able-bodied people that keeps it cleaner and more private than most of the other options. But few have considered the reason a handicapped stall is necessary in the first place: because normal stalls require of the user two functional legs, and functional legs are something a small but significant portion of the population lacks.
The Americans With Disabilities Act requires that public accommodations must provide accessible facilities for disabled people. This ensures a building meets the needs of every bathroom-going member of the public. But access comes at a cost: handicapped bathrooms require twice the real estate to provide the same amount of convenience. More money has to be invested in providing less utility.
And these stalls aren’t exactly easy on the users, either. A wheelchair-bound bathroom-goer has to maneuver his chair back and forth into a position at which he can push his butt off the chair and onto the toilet — not an easy thing to do when, like any able-bodied user, your biggest concern is to keep you pants from touching the floor.
Korean designers Changduk Kim and Youngki Hong have solved this problem with their Universal Toilet. Not only does it require a quarter of the space of a typical handicapped stall, but it provides a single appliance that poopers of all physical abilities can utilize.
The major cognitive breakthrough of the Universal Toilet is the reversible crapper: fully-abled users can assume the standard position facing the door, while handicapped users can easily lift off their chair and mount the throne in the backwards position. Roll up, lift off, unload, push off, roll out.
This concept should be embraced by all concerned parties — building developers, handicapped users, and fully-abled users alike. In addition to saving money and space, the design removes the social stigma many disabled poopers feel is imposed on them by their exclusive stalls. “Disabled people,” Kim and Hong say, “don’t want dedicated facilities. What they really want is to live seamlessly with everyone.”
The only obvious fault in this design is fairly trivial: the seat itself. Straddling that angular surface seems to promise an unusual and uncomfortable pooping experience. But everything in a design prototype like this is intentional, which means this seat must have some specific intent. I can think of two: first is that this seat design is just a focal point for criticism. With critics and bloggers focusing on this minor detail, the over-arching idea is accepted as given. Once the seat is redesigned, the critics are placated and the idea itself can move forward without resistance. (It’s a trick I’ve learned whenever presenting work to a boss: provide an obvious flaw for them to correct so they feel like they’ve done their job.)
The second possibility is that the angular seat is designed to force the butt cheeks apart (as opposed to traditional seats, which squish the butt cheeks together). In this, it’s possible that Kim and Hong have actually created two revolutionary toilet redesigns: the Universal Toilet, and the Butt Spreading Toilet Seat.
Come to think of it, there may be a third revolutionary toilet redesign hidden in this Universal Toilet technology: how often do you find a public toilet with a comfortable backrest?
