The doors of the out-house where I work are open all the time now (the goat-house is the building on the right),
and a small bird just flew in.
hung around for a while,
and flew away again.
I think she was looking for food.
A Robin Redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.
But a blue-tit or a snake
Wouldn’t bother William Blake.
A Bad Guide 
Where I come from, “outhouse” and “on the make” both mean something different.
Uthus is a Norwegian word for a kind of farm structure. It’s not ‘outhouse’, meaning ‘an outdoor toilet for the poor’, it’s out-house, meaning ‘my studio’. This was proposed by a linguist (Marie-Lucie).
If you don’t like ‘on the make‘ you can substitute ‘or a snake‘, or something similar.
‘an outdoor toilet for the poor’
The poor had one-holers, the ordinary people had two-holers, and the very rich farmers had three holers. There was once a three holer that had been overturned in the countryside and everyone remarked on how well-off the owners must have been.
Now that I think of it, “tit” isn’t a word to be used in polite company here either.
We would say “out buildings” as a general term that would include the privy, but the “outhouse” has that one special function. We are all descended from Norwegians and Swedes and Danes, too, so they must have known what that meant in their native tongues.
Huh? No, I don’t think so.
I’m curious — do you not have lots of mosquitoes and other such insects up there? I’m in Northern Ontario, and could never leave a door or window open in the summer — I’d be eaten alive. I would have thought you’d have similar insect life, but perhaps not?
In Gaelic, “tigh beg” – the wee house. (i.e. the outdoor cludgy.)
No, we don’t. We have mosquitoes in the evening, so we use screens in the bedroom windows, but not much in daytime. The mosquitoes are bad inland in north Norway and also in parts of Sweden & Finland, where they have millions of lakes. They’re also bad in parts of Scotland, where they’re known as ‘midges’.
We sometimes have some rather attractive beetles.
Oh, and there are flies when the cows are around.
Ah, talking of midges…
I hadn’t heard of those, tigh beg or cludgy. I don’t think they’re related to Norwegian. I like ‘cludgy’, ‘I’m feeling a bit cludgy today’.
According to Wiki:
I don’t know if that’s related to your usage, dearie.
I admit that “cludgy” formed no part of my childhood – I think it’s Glaswegian, but, anyway, I think it’s quite good. At our school, they were just “the bogs”. But they were outdoors, naturally.
Yes,we had bogs. At one school I went to, from age 7 to 9-ish, you would open a normal-looking oak-paneled door along the main, double-loaded corridor and you would suddenly be outside in a small rectangular room with no roof — in the rain, or the evening darkness, or whatever. There was a constant flow of water down one wall, which was painted black. There was one fluorescent light. It was all rather frightening. It must have been an early-Victorian experiment (in fear and public conveniences).
Well, that’s why they’re called bogs, rather than love-nests, say. Damp, frightening places where it goes plop in the night (the bogs, I mean).
Nijma doesn’t say what the advantages of three-holers might have been. She leaves the impression that they were just status symbols. I think we can exclude their being intended for synchronous shiteing. Possibly they had different sizes – for Papa, Mama and Baby Bear – but were used only one at a time.
Sez Tolstoi: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But I bet happy families each have their own outhouse ways. Tolstoi didn’t think of that.
that’s why they’re called bogs, rather than love-nests, say
It’s weird going into a roofless room in the middle of a building — I think I once mentioned to Jamessal that I’m interested in surrealism in architecture (an unstudied topic, as far as I know*), well this is the kind of thing I mean.
(Apart from a not terribly interesting book of that name, edited by Thos Mikal).
I finally have a pretext to mention my blogsite again, to which no one has been coming (<* pouts *>). The “Complete Smiley” post describes something you might want to listen to this coming Sunday.
I now post regularly. I should have done this from the beginning.
Yes, if nobody’s there nobody comes.
There’s nothing unusual about indoor unroofed areas, like patios or small courtyards – all that Spanish and Latin American stuff. What do you mean by “room” in this connection? Come to think of it, why didn’t those bogs have roofs, with plenty of aeration openings? Maybe people liked the idea of peeing “outside”. You do mean “peeing” bogs, and not the more amply equipped ones? Or was one supposed to sidle up backwards to that black, wet wall ….? Now that would be surreal.
Were these unroofed rooms located where two or more self-sustaining buildings abutted? That wouldn’t exactly be “in the middle of a building”.
Were these unroofed rooms located where two or more self-sustaining buildings abutted?
No. Like I said, it was in the middle of a (two storey) building.
Being an architect, I am aware of the courtyard parti. There were no windows or openings other than the door I’ve mentioned. Now I think about it there may have been a row of toilet bowls along one wall.
I’ve mentioned before that another school I went to had the world’s longest line of urinals. It was in the Guinness Book of Records.
I’m not understanding something. Was this thing on the ground floor, and surrounded by windowless walls two storeys high, and had no roof??
Yes, it was on the ground floor, two storeys on one side, one storey on the others, I think.
I think I’m doing pretty well at remembering this, I haven’t been there for nearly fifty years. Can you describe the bogs from when you were seven?
Three-holed outhouse: I never saw this one myself, it was only a legend.
The real question is what a two-holer is used for, since the first thing you do upon entering is barricade the door with that little block of wood that turns on a nail.
Here’s a bit of surreal architecture for you, Crown (from this Boston Globe piece by Claire Messud on Israeli brutality):
Does “panopticon” bother you as much as it bothers me? (I don’t have access to the OED, so my next question isn’t as confidently rhetorical as I’d like.) Is it even an adjective? Whatever it might say other than “all-seeing” is certainly wrong for the occasion.
While I’m at it, she also describes Palestine as a “dystopian surreality.” Eek. Why torture those words into being things that they are not? “Surreal dystopia,” please. Pretty please. I never thought that phrase could sound so good.
Sure I can. In middle-class America, we didn’t have bogs, but standard-cut indoor bathrooms. You see one, you’ve seen them all.
The only exciting variation was the outhouse at the farm my grandparents had in Jackson, Mississippi. Well, maybe not exciting, but different. It had cobwebs, because my grandparents weren’t at the farm that much. I did worry a bit whether something like a snake or scorpion might leap out of the depths and bite me on the butt.
Totally agree. Pompous twit. She’s thinking it’s ‘panoptican’, sort of like ‘African’. I don’t have the OED either, but I’m feeling lucky here.
Give it to ’em, Jim! No pulling of punches, you’ve got them against the ropes in that round.
The Panopticon is a fascinating item in the history of social ideas (see Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison) It was an idea of Jeremy Bentham’s.
Yet another Jeremy!
Yes, I think Jim knows. Jeremy Bentham is most revered (by me, anyway) for having been stuffed on his death, but he was a very great man — the first Utilitarian, though John Stuart Mill gets all the credit for that.
The panopticon is, of course, first and foremost, important in the history of…ARCHITECTURE.
Yet another Stuart! I used to think there were more Stewarts than Stuarts (known in Britain for being the royal spelling), but now I’m not so sure.
Ages ago I read a fictional account of a (prehistoric?) tribe for whom defecation was a social activity to be performed with the group, while in contrast dining was a strictly solitary affair.
I think this was in the opening chapters of a novel by Guenther Grass that I started reading (in translation). I guess I got bogged down somehow and never finished. I think the book was “The Flounder” (“Der Butt”). So related to the wishing-Butt tale mentioned in one of Stuart’s blog posts, I suppose.
There was an interesting article about prison architecture in the NY Times magazine recently http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/,
mentioned the panopticon briefly but was mostly about a new prison in Austria.
Mill doesnt count though, hiding the splendour of Stuart behind the boring facade of John.
Are you sure you aren’t thinking of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, by Buñuel?
“.. Stewarts than Stuarts (known in Britain for being the royal spelling)”: it’s the French spelling, coming from Mary’s sojourn there. If they’d used the Scots spelling they’d have pronounced her Marie Stevart.
My father always said a word (always) which I heard as “weehoosentheather” and only long after he died did I decipher it as the “wee house in the heather”. He got this expression (maybe) from an aged genuinely Scotch woman with a broad Scotch pronunciation know (to me) only as “Grannie” even though she was no relation. I never heard my father use any other word for loo.
Has anyone else heard this variation?
And tits have more cones in their eyes than we do, so those yellow breasts are really in some frequency we cannot see. Knowing this, their beautiful song (or remark, it is not so long) always makes me think they probably hear in frequencies we cannot, also. And they really DO like coconuts.
That was certainly an impression one might have taken away from certain Madonna concerts.
I find your formulation: “bird remarks, rather than bird song”, quite striking. I haven’t been treated to such a brilliant mot juste in a long while.
“cludgie” may be the more usual spelling