A bit of advice, Patty: if you’re going to start machine-gunning sacred cows, be prepared to replace them. You offer a lot of criticism and snarky commentary, yet almost nothing in the way of original hypotheses. I realize this is an entertainment site rather than a professional journal, but it likes to masquerade as infotainment. Try to hit one or the other.

@sam – How come somebody always has to drag politics into absolutely everything.

or football. That’s it. That’s what I’m choosing to believe. :)

j p maher

Oxford English Dictionary and others are deeply flawed in citing “-ing” forms as verbal. In any case a dictionary is not a primary source.

A primary source from the very era in which Thos. Crapper Co. Valveless Waste Preventers were cleaning up was discovered by the world’s supreme Crapper expert, Ken Grabowski of Chicago:

Headline in The Washington Post of July 6, 1894: “BAGGED -A NEST OF CRAPPERS”. The “crappers” here are gamblers, crap-shooters.

No one had yet uttered “went to the Crapper and crapped there”.

Thomas Crapper must be restored to the Pantheon of Eponymy, alongside Bloomer and Blazer. This goes for General Joe Hooker”, too. Copy-cat Mavens, Word Smiths, and Netymologists have not done their homework and should be exposed as wuacks.

Re Crapper. Single “inventors” are all inventions, since every “invention” is but a point in a long series of innovations and improvements, most of them anonymous. The plumbing entrepreneur Thomas Crapper of course was not the inventor of the flush toilet. Many “inventors” preceded him, but his Yorkshire surname DID provide the basis for the back formation (pardon) “to crap, crapped”. If a word for defecation “to crap” had been in circulation in Victoria’s England, never would it have been allowed to cast iron water jackets emblazoned “CRAPPER’S Water Waste Preventer…”. The manufacturer’s name “CRAPPER” can be seen on a man (pardon) hole cover at Westminster Abbey. Never before WW I is there any record of a verb “to crap”. The first attestations are in graffiti recorded by Allen Walker Read in the 1930s, hardly a dozen years after Armistice Day, and in WW I veterans’ books.
The 1840s phrase “crapping ken” has been totally misunderstood by the word mavens and wordsmiths. It was not a reference to a WC. After all a “water closet” is an inside job, not an outhouse. This is itself an Americanism; in Britain an “outhouse” is simply an outbuilding, no value added. The “crapping ken” of humorous literature was a facetious circumlocution for a little house (ken) in the garden, to which gentle folk retired to “pluck a rose” (J. Swift) or a handful of user-friendly, biodegradable grass — a CROP (south English) or CRAP (north English and Scotch language. (“Scots” is the Scottish language form.)

This is late, and I’m sure no one will notice, but I feel like sharing. :)