OK, so I’m sitting down, you know…the place where I do my best thinking, and I realize that I’m out of toilet paper. So, I scare up another roll from a package marked “bathroom tissue”.
It got my mind rolling, why do people almost universally call TP “toilet paper” and manufacturers universally call it “bathroom tissue”. Is this some stubborn game of chicken that we’re not even aware we’re playing? Seriously, have you ever heard someone call the stuff bathroom tissue?
Now, this isn’t like the Kleenex issue, where the common name is trademarked AFAIK.
Why are marketing companies so afraid of the word toilet paper? Can you think of any other instances where a product is named one thing by the seller, but it is almost universally refered to by another, non-trademarked, name?
BTW: There was a teevee ad in the '70s that showed a woman running through a store and trailing toilet paper behind her and yelling, “It’s too good for toilet paper!”
Manufacturers do seem to shy away from explicit reference to the purpose of toilet paper.
Many department stores, railway stations etc. seem to be equally averse to the word “toilet” itself. Harrods has “luxury washrooms” (A quid a time to use, but to come out to find an attendant with towel draped over arm…) Dingles has a “ladies’ powder room” (a reference to cocaine?) and a “gentlemens’ rest room”.
Others seem to include “conveniences”, “cloakrooms”, “bathrooms” (interestingly with no bath in sight), “lavatories”, and “comfort stations”.
Why the euphamisms? Is this a British phenomenon?
No other name seems to be skated round in quite this way, though the tv ads are rather ambiguous in their marketing of sanitary towels. I always thought “bodyform” was some confidence enhancing drug or happy pill.
I can think of scads of medical conditions that are commonly referred to by names different than can be found in advertisements, i.e. “occasional irregularity” instead of “constipation”. Most of these euphemisms tend to be about subjects that are embarassing.
As for products, the products I commonly hear referred to as “maxi-pads” are called “sanitary napkins” by the manufacturers. But that may be a regional thing, similar to the soda/pop/Coke debacle.
And so on. These are just what I could think of off the top of my head.
While we’re on the subject of freakishly euphemistic usages, WTF is up with those maxi pad commercials where they pour BLUE STUFF on the pad to show how absorbent it is? All I can think of when they do that is, man, if something BLUE shows up on my pad, the first thing I think about isn’t going to be how absorbent it is.
I have yet to see an advert for sanitary towels or tampons on UK TV which uses the words sanitary towel or tampon.
I am constantly asking my partner what is being advertised, an innocent enough query which often results in violence being inflicted upon my person.
As an aside, I once worked for Sanitary Towel & Tampon manufacturer Smith & Nephew. We used spare Sanitary Towels for cleaning the blackboard in our orifice.
When I was at Ogilvy, they were putting together the Red Dot campain for Kotex. If you’ve seen the ads, they are the ones that are a play on the word “period”, using a red dot as the period. They deliberately wanted to get away from the “women wearing pastels walking on the beach” advertising, but they had a huge problem getting the networks to agree to the color red in a commercial about menstrual products.
I’ve heard sanitary napkin, but I have never heard sanitary towel. To me the word ‘towel’ conjures up an image of a beach towel or something that size. The phrase ‘sanitary towel’ just scares me.
Something I’ve always wondered is if advertisers are so adverse to the term “toilet paper”, how is it that we know what we’re supposed to do with it? Was there ever a commercial or something early on that indicated that “you use this to wipe up after…uh…you know”? Was it advertised as an alternative to corn cobs and Sears & Roebuck’s catalogs? Or did the Teeming Millions just “figure it out”?
Actually, AFAIK the issue is one of FDA regulations - as soon as an advertisement mentions the particular diagnosis a product is for, the manufacturer has to come up with reams of disclaimers. That’s why we have ads for “The Purple Pill,” with no discussion that “The Purple Pill” is for dyspepsia. (Although I think that rolls off the tongue rather nicely…)
However, I have to say, some commercials are TOO explicit-
the Not So Fresh Feeling
And the one for the yeast infection cream, where this mousy little frump is sitting there, saying, “Oh, this horrible vaginal itch!” Um, thanks for that LOVELY mental picture.
Companies are extremely ironically paranoid of lawsuits. I say, “ironically” because this paranoia causes 99% of lawsuits against companies, but I digress.
In their mind, toilet paper is something that gets thrown around people’s houses as a prank. So, by changing what they call it, they think they’re creating a defence, “Well, that was toilet paper, but we don’t sell toilet paper.”
Companies and governments are stupid, so they think changing the name of something changes what it is. They think they can turn murder into protection, theft into taxation, rudeness into customer service, etc. just by calling it what they want it to be.
I’m sorry. It doesn’t work that way. Bathroom tissue doesn’t exist, and calling toilet paper that does nothing but expose your idiocy. I refuse to buy toilet paper that’s labelled as “bathroom tissue.” My logic is this: If they don’t even know what it’s called, how could they possibly know how to make it with even the tiniest amount of quality?
There’s no choice. English (either side of the pond) has no proper word for the room with the toilet in it. It is unique (as far as I know) in that the only terms we have for it are indirect and euphemistic; even slang is all off-target. I have heard that it’s the same in most languages but can’t vouch for it.
I’ve seen toilet paper called “bath tissue” too. Not “bathroom tissue,” but “bath tissue”! Which makes no sense as you certainly don’t use it in the bathtub!