Have you ever visited the Lady Lou?
The origins of the word loo have long puzzled etymologists. In addition to discovering society beauty Lady Diana Cooper's 1936 letter, Wordhunters also uncovered a letter from historian Sir Steven Runciman relating to a “Lady Lou” - could this be the vital piece of evidence?
Tania Styles, OED Etymologist: The theory that the word loo arose as a result of a practical joke at the expense of one unfortunate Lady Louisa isn’t new to the OED - we have in our files a copy of a letter from Lady Constance Cairns telling the same story. It’s interesting that Sir Steven Runciman’s letter attributes it to the same source.
Of course, lexicographers are in no position to judge what may or may not have happened at the Duke of Abercorn’s house one night in 1867 - matters of historical record are best left to historians like Sir Steven. For me as an etymologist, the test by which a theory about a word’s origin stands or falls is how well it fits with the linguistic record: that is, with the way we know that word was used, as documented in the OED’s quotations. In these terms, there is good news and bad for Lady Louisa. In terms of social milieu, the theory and the record fit well. Our first example of loo comes from Nancy Mitford, who famously went on to identify it as one of a handful of words that characterised upper-class (U) English, and Constance Cairns’s account gives the word exactly the same kind of aristocratic pedigree.
In other respects though, there are discrepancies. The spelling history of loo does nothing to help Lady Louisa’s case. The noun seems consistently to have been spelled loo, and never lou like the short form of the forename; nor does it seem to have been capitalized. But the most serious mismatch between this etymological theory and the documentary record of the word is chronological. The story Sir Steven Runciman recounts places the origin of loo in the 1860s; yet despite the best efforts of Wordhunters and the OED, we still cannot be sure that anyone ever actually used the word until the beginning of the Second World War, more than 80 years later. Granted, what we are dealing with is a colloquial euphemism on a sensitive subject which is unlikely to have made it into the Times, Victorian sensibilities being what they were. Still, it is a leap of faith we cannot make to take it on trust that any word existed in English for the best part of a century on the basis of no evidence at all.
As things stand then, this theory about the etymology of loo, appealing though it is, does not have enough support from the linguistic record for us to single it out from its many rivals for special mention in the OED. But as viewers of Balderdash & Piffle know, we are always trying to improve this record. If any earlier examples of loo come to light - perhaps in more private, unpublished sources like letters, journals, or family papers - we may have cause to reconsider, especially if they record spellings that reflect the personal name Lou. Of course, the Holy Grail for this theory would be 19th-century examples of people 'going to the Lady Lou', or making urgent visits to 'the Louisa'. If any Wordhunters can find them, we may be able to fulfil Steven Runciman’s wish after all, and give Lady Louisa Anson a place in the OED.
Why didn’t the OED accept the police notebook (pictured above) as evidence of domestic?
When a former police officer sent in his notebook featuring the word domestic we thought we had hit the jackpot with a six year antedating of the noun. But it didn’t cut the mustard with the OED…
John Simpson, OED Chief Editor: The police notebook was potentially ideal evidence. Although it wasn’t published, it was datable from internal evidence – and we were very excited by the prospect of finding such an early example of the noun ‘domestic’.
But although the source was acceptable, we needed to look at the text it provided. And that was the problem. The single word domestic was presented without any context. Perhaps it was a noun, short for 'domestic argument’ or something similar; or perhaps it was just the adjective domestic written as an aide-memoire for the police officer to use when writing up his notes.
For us to say that this example was truly the first example of the noun, we have to be absolutely certain. If you start introducing ambiguous evidence, then the whole edifice of the dictionary starts to crumble. And in this case – whichever way we looked at it – the evidence was ambiguous, and so sadly we had to reject it.
How did regime change change its meaning?
When is a euphemism not a euphemism? Click on the updated OED entry for regime change and you will see some early examples of the term that are not euphemistic. How and when did this term turn a corner?
John Simpson: The expression regime change has been in existence since at least 1925. But in those days it was just a simple expression meaning the replacement of one ruling group in a country by another. Later on this neutral term started to acquire a new twist in its meaning: it wasn’t just the replacement of one regime by another, but a change of regime which was brought about intentionally by an external power, for political ends.
The Wordhunter’s new example showed this happening earlier than our existing evidence had demonstrated. Here was regime change used as if it were a neutral term – the most obvious phrase to employ when discussing the phenomenon - but the context showed that there was more to it: the existing regime was being forcibly ousted and the process was being euphemistically referred to as a simple change of regime. A good example of how the meaning of words can be manipulated.