Mind your language
Radio Four had a trailer programme for a series it will run in August called Word 4 Word. (Yes, it is a bit silly to have a visual pun on the wireless.) It is intended to contribute to Leeds University’s new dialect map of the United Kingdom, a splendid project.
I am not sure how much Radio Four’s findings are contributing so far to the Leeds survey, since the programme encouraged interviewees to come up with what were in effect nonce-terms and jocular slang coinages. An example was five-finger disco for shoplifting — not a lexical item that is likely to find a longlived place on the nation’s verbal atlas.
What I found more than annoying, though, was the declaration by one of the programme’s panel, Craig Charles, that he had only recently discovered that the verb to crap came from the sanitary engineer Thomas Crapper (1837–1910). This is a commonly held view and it is plain wrong.
Popular etymology of this sort memorable and plausible and wrong — has a tenacious hold. The Thomas Crapper error was neatly disposed of by Michael Quinion in his admirable book Port Out, Starboard Home. He didn’t say much more than is found in the OED, but that is quite enough to prove that crap does not come from Thomas Crapper.
Since his book was published, though, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has been published, and this fine monument of learning gives comfort to those in error about crap. While it admits that crap ‘was in former times applied to various sorts of rubbish’, it suggests that because ‘Crapper’s name and trade were blazoned across the façade of his King’s Road premises’, the word crapper ‘may have been introduced [to America] by troops who first encountered Thomas Crapper’s sanitary fittings in Britain’.
This speculation is utterly implausible. Who were these soldiers in the King’s Road? Crapper is recorded in America from 1932, and in 1939 was used by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, so we are not talking about GIs from the 1940s but perhaps Americans on leave from France from 1917.
Yet the word crap was happily domesticated in America, as in Britain, long before. Alternatives to crapper included crapping-case and crapping castle. Crap finds mediaeval analogues in Old French crappe and Mediaeval Latin crappa. It has been used in various senses, ‘chaff’, ‘offscourings’, ‘rubbish’, ‘ordure’, in English since the 15th century. The real question is where Thomas Crapper’s name derives from.
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