Mozilla Open Source Support: First Awards Made

Posted Dec 14, 2015 22:37 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: Mozilla Open Source Support: First Awards Made by Wol
Parent article: Mozilla Open Source Support: First Awards Made

> Look at the history of words used to describe the humble latrine (or equivalent). I carefully used the word "latrine" because, to the best of knowledge, it doesn't have any prior ancestry.

"Crapper" is the name of the man who invented the ball float mechanism[1], so that's where that one comes from.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Crapper

Mozilla Open Source Support: First Awards Made

Posted Dec 16, 2015 18:29 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

The OED disagrees with you (and the very Wikipedia page you link has a whole section devoted to the same).

Etymology of the already somewhat archaic/dialectical 'crapper' in the modern form: CRAP + -ER suffix, first recorded use 1932, long after Thomas Crapper died. 'Crap' itself is recorded in the 15th century (as chaff, dregs, weeds growing among corn), identical with a Dutch word, and is likely related to similar words in Old French.

Even the specific meaning relating to excrement has its first recorded use in the OED (as the noun 'crapping') in 1849, at which point Thomas Crapper was thirteen years old, and an unambiguous one in 1859, at which point Crapper had only recently started work and was relatively little known. His fame was decades away (and may well have been helped by his name being so apposite!)

Mozilla Open Source Support: First Awards Made

Posted Dec 16, 2015 18:44 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> His fame was decades away (and may well have been helped by his name being so apposite!)

The wikipedia entry says that his father was a Sailor but his brother a Plumber who Thomas apprenticed under, maybe crap jobs were in the family history at a time when job-based family names were taken, such that it's not entirely coincidence for him to have been involved in sanitation.