Latrinalia is a type of deliberately inscribed or etched marking made on

latrine A latrine is a toilet or an even simpler facility that is used as a toilet within a sanitation system. For example, it can be a communal trench in the earth in a camp to be used as emergency sanitation, a hole in the ground ( pit latrine), or ...

s; that is, bathrooms or lavatory walls. It can take the form of art,

drawing Drawing is a form of visual art in which an artist uses instruments to mark paper or other two-dimensional surface. Drawing instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, various kinds of paints, inked brushes, colored pencils, crayo ...

s, or

word A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no conse ...

s, including

poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek '' poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meani ...

and personal reflections. Other types of latrinalia include political commentary and notes on love as well as derogatory (sharing low opinions) comments and pictures. When done without the

property Property is a system of rights that gives people legal control of valuable things, and also refers to the valuable things themselves. Depending on the nature of the property, an owner of property may have the right to consume, alter, share, r ...

owner's

consent Consent occurs when one person voluntarily agrees to the proposal or desires of another. It is a term of common speech, with specific definitions as used in such fields as the law, medicine, research, and sexual relationships. Consent as und ...

, it constitutes

vandalism Vandalism is the action involving deliberate destruction of or damage to public or private property. The term includes property damage, such as graffiti and defacement directed towards any property without permission of the owner. The ter ...

. Some venues have attempted to curb such vandalism by installing in the lavatory large

blackboard A blackboard (also known as a chalkboard) is a reusable writing surface on which text or drawings are made with sticks of calcium sulphate or calcium carbonate, known, when used for this purpose, as chalk. Blackboards were originally made o ...

s and providing free

chalk Chalk is a soft, white, porous, sedimentary carbonate rock. It is a form of limestone composed of the mineral calcite and originally formed deep under the sea by the compression of microscopic plankton that had settled to the sea floor. C ...

; it is hoped that patrons will avail themselves of the blackboard and chalk rather than applying their latrinalia directly to the walls or toilet stalls.

Study and etymology

An important work in the study of latrinalia is

Allen Walker Read Allen Walker Read (June 2, 1906 – October 16, 2002) was an American etymologist and lexicographer. Born in Minnesota, he spent much of his career as a professor at Columbia University in New York. Read's work ''Classic American Graffiti'' is w ...

's ''Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America: A Glossarial Study of the Low Element in the English Vocabulary.'' The work describes and collates examples of graffiti observed by Reade on a road trip throughout the Western United States in 1928. It was privately published in Paris in 1935 since its description of bathroom

graffiti Graffiti (plural; singular ''graffiti'' or ''graffito'', the latter rarely used except in archeology) is art that is written, painted or drawn on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from s ...

was considered too racy for American publishers. It was eventually published in the United States in 1977, under the title ''Classic American Graffiti'',

ISBN The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric commercial book identifier that is intended to be unique. Publishers purchase ISBNs from an affiliate of the International ISBN Agency. An ISBN is assigned to each separate edition a ...

0-916500-06-3. The work was described as a classic "model study" of latrinalia that "deserves the attention of any serious student of American language" in a 1979 review, which noted that even then it remained hard to access and "excessively rare." The late

Alan Dundes Alan Dundes (September 8, 1934 – March 30, 2005) was an American folklorist. He spent much of his career as a professional academic at the University of California, Berkeley and published his ideas in a wide range of books and articles. H ...

, a folklorist at

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...

, coined the term ''latrinalia'' in 1966 to refer to

found in restrooms. Dundes preferred it over the term ''shithouse poetry'', as not all latrinalia is in verse or poetic form. The word is derived from the

compounding In the field of pharmacy, compounding (performed in compounding pharmacies) is preparation of a custom formulation of a medication to fit a unique need of a patient that cannot be met with commercially available products. This may be done for me ...

of ''latrine'' (or toilet) and the

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carr ...

''-analia'', which signifies a worthless collection of something — in this case bathroom writings.

Bibliography

*Joseph Gelfer, ''The Little Book of Toilet Graffiti'' *Jim Morrison, ''Privy Thoughts: Some Toilet Graffiti Found On University Bathroom Doors''

References

External links

From The Bathroom Wall - A blog about bathroom graffiti and other humorous topics OFFLINE 2 Sep 2022Latrinalia (e Bathroom Graffiti)
— Electronic Bathroom Graffiti uploads from around the world.
Bathroom Graffiti
— Bathroom Graffiti by author and photographer Mark Ferem
Bathroom Graffiti Project
— features and rates hundreds of photos of latrinalia from around the world
Latrinalia
— features galleries of bathroom graffiti *Raina Williams

''Department of Psychology,

University of California, Davis The University of California, Davis (UC Davis, UCD, or Davis) is a public land-grant research university near Davis, California. Named a Public Ivy, it is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The inst ...

'' *Mark Ferem
Latrinalia: "It's all in The Head"
''50mm Los Angeles'' *Matt Schneider
Stall Wall
an ethnography on latrinalia
Origins of Bathroom Graffiti Documentary

The Writing on the Stall
Graffiti and unauthorised signage Writing {{art-stub

Study and etymology

See also

Bibliography

References

External links