Latrinalia is a type of deliberately inscribed or etched marking made on latrines; 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, crayons, ...

s, or words, including poetry 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 owner's consent, it constitutes vandalism. 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 Blackboards were originally made of ...

s and providing free chalk; 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'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 was considered too racy for American publishers. It was eventually published in the United States in 1977, under the title ''Classic American Graffiti'', ISBN 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, coined the term ''latrinalia'' in 1966 to refer to graffiti 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 carry ...

''-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'' *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