The Inuit’s and other peoples living in frigid regions tended to go with clumps of snow to wipe with, which, other than the coldness factor, is actually one of the better options it seems compared to many other of the above methods. Poor people would poop in rivers and clean off with water, rags, wood shavings (ouch!), leaves, hay, rocks, sand, moss, sea weed, apple husks, seashells, ferns, and pretty much whatever else was at hand and cheap/free.įor seaman, the common thing was to use old frayed anchor cables (seriously). The goose is kind of getting the crappy end of that deal. The 16th century French writer Francois Rabelais, in his work Gargantua and Pantagruel, recommended using “the neck of a goose, that is well downed”. Rich people often used hemp, lace, or wool. So what did people use for wiping before toilet paper? This depended greatly on region, personal preference, and wealth. started using toilet paper.ĭespite toilet paper having been around since at least the 6th century AD (initially in China), it wouldn’t be until the late 19th century when toilet paper would be first introduced in America and England and it wasn’t until the 1900s, around the same time the indoor toilet became common, that toilet paper would catch on with the masses. In the process of researching this charming topic, we came across bog roll, TP, toot paper (thanks Kath & Kim), and other terms.Today I found out it’s only been very recently that people in the U.S. Date roll and crap wrap are a couple of others to round out the list. There's also dunny documents, which is an odd combination of slang and officiousness. There's a tendency to refer to the paper itself as 'tickets' in many phrases, such as poo ticket (for a square of toilet paper), pack of poo tickets (for a roll of toilet paper) and shit tickets, which is self-explanatory. The term bum fodder is slang from the 1880s in England that is occasionally still heard today. After that, I'm afraid it gets a little more base. Finally, if someone's luck is in, and you wish that it would change for the worse, you may cry I hope your chooks turn into emus and kick your dunny down.īut back to loo paper.
If your luck is out you can exclaim If it was raining palaces I'd be hit on the head by the dunny door. To be all alone like a country dunny is to be completely alone or isolated. Someone who is brainless couldn't train a choko vine to grow up a dunny wall, and something useless is described as being as useful as a glass door on a dunny. And of course lavatory paper, loo paper and dunny paper.Īs an aside, dunny has been immortalised in a number of slang phrases. The usual alternative to toilet paper is toilet tissue, which makes it sound much softer. But closer to home (in a lot of countries), we've already got quite a few words for that in-demand product selling out in supermarkets across Australia – toilet paper. There are new words being born every day, mostly to do with COVID-19 and the many changes this is bringing to our daily lives and to the planet in general.
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