> Back in the old day, when men were men, saying "toilet paper" wouldn't cause a room full of people to faint in shock at the dirty word. People were hard then.
Pardon? When was this era?
"Toilet paper" was embarrassing in the late 1800s when it became available in the US. Quoting https://www.heatandplumb.com/blog/history-of-toilet-paper :
"The next significant American innovation came in 1890, when brothers Clarence and E. Irvin Scott marketed the first toilet paper roll. They found more success than Gayetty thanks to negotiating trade deals with several hotels and local shops, Despite the steady income they generated, the brothers struggled to sell their toilet paper to the wider population; many Americans were too embarrassed to purchase it in public."
Or from https://community.oerproject.com/b/blog/posts/a-splinter-fre... :
"But many people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were reluctant to talk openly about poop. They were often too embarrassed to walk out of a store carrying an armful of toilet paper. People would instead order something like “wrapping paper” with a wink and a nod to the shopkeeper. But marketers eventually found a way to fix this problem. Have you ever wondered why so many TP brands have pictures of baby animals or baby humans on them? They used to have images of beautiful women on the packages. Advertisers wanted to emphasize softness and to avoid talking about the fact that these were rolls of paper designed to remove excrement from the human body."
You can see one way marketers worked to calm this embarrassment in a 1922 advertisement:
easy to ask for - easy to get
Ask for Northern Tissue. You don't
even have to say toilet paper. You
will get the most thoroughly safe,
pure, salutary product, fine and soft,
yet firm, 650 sheets to the roll, and
surprisingly low in price.
AND YOU CAN GET IT WITH-
OUT EMBARRASSMENT. SIMPLY
Ask for
Northern Tissue
at any of these stores
(Fifth page of the PDF at
https://archive.org/details/lincoln-evening-state-journal-an... .)
Here's a quote from a 1947 short story at https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl... :
Jolan's wife came from the house and to the gate, a child in her
arms. "Here, Lora" she called in a loud voice. "You'll need this. It's
going to be all day." She handed Lora a small roll of toilet paper, a
precious article here. She spoke without modesty, for in a house with-
out windows if one blushed at such things one would bleed away into
blushes.
Yes, someone more well-off would be expected to blush about using toilet paper in public like that.
The idea that "toilet paper" was something improper existed until at least the 1950s. Here's a 1958 use from https://archive.org/details/ucladailybruin36losa/page/n127/m... :
One of the entries — the winning one has not yet been
chosen — is written entirely on Seppi paper (it's so
crude to say toilet paper) cutely bound with a feminine
pink ribbon.
Indeed, my own grandmother would say "TP" instead of "toilet paper".