Necessary houses

A short way above Fishguard's old harbour is a terraced row of four small cottages that must have been home to rope-makers, boat-builders and herring-packers at one time. Now they have been smartened up and have all mod cons. But to one side still stand, one for each cottage, these four disused earth closets - or privies, tai bach (little houses), netties, dunnies, kharzies, jakes, heads, shithouses, crappers, thunderboxes, bogs, johns, lavatories, loos, latrines, conveniences, restrooms....well, what do YOU call the necessary house?

In my everyday parlance I refer to the bog. I was brought up to say lavatory or WC (formal), loo or lav (informal) and to avoid 'toilet': although it's universal now that word still doesn't come easily to me. I hate euphemisms. When asking for 'the bathroom' in America I have to enclose the word in mental quotation marks as it engenders in me a mixture of mirth and embarrassment. After all it's a relatively modern custom to have the thing you shit in located in the same room as the thing you bath in. But then I passed my early years in a house that had neither.

There is a very readable Short History of the Privy (actually it's quite long) called The Hidden Room and this graffiti poem on a lavatory wall in a Norfolk mansion is attributed to Byron:

Fair Cloacina, Goddess of this place,
Look on thy suppliant with a smiling face.
Soft, yet cohesive, let my offering flow,
Not rudely swift nor insolently slow.