I guess I am fortunate not to have a master’s degree.
The implication to me is that 3a and 3b are somehow related, like maybe there’s a door between them, or they share a common connected bathroom. It makes intuitive sense to number the master bedroom #1 if you’re going to go with numbering, and then just consecutively number adjacent bedrooms.
If parents are interested in which of the bedrooms is larger, they can just look at the dimensions on the plan. Besides, sometimes location and the shape of the room are more important considerations than square footage.
In any case, my original point way back in the OP is that changing the long-established terminology of “master bedroom” is pointless and ridiculous. Of course if people want to start calling it something else because it makes more sense to them, and it catches on, then fine, that’s the way language evolves. But doing it by edict because of some imagined hidden offensiveness is asinine.
What are “Jack and Jill bathrooms”? I have never heard that term.
A bathroom between 2 bedrooms, with no access other than to the 2 bedrooms. Likely used as the childrens’ bathroom. Some fancier homes will have an “en suite” for the parents, a Jack and Jill for the kids, and then a powder room for guests.
Thx. My grandmother’s house had that. It was used by her two daughters, or by a single visiting grandchild, so it’s not a new thing that the implied sexes of the word doesn’t match the people using it.
We just called it the kids’ bathroom.
Good grief. English, whether American English or any other form, imports terms directly from other languages all the time. That’s how we got such a non-impoverished vocabulary in the first place. The word “impoverished” is of French origin.
And I’ve been hearing ‘suite’ for a bedroom with attached bath for – must be at least 30 years, maybe longer?
I didn’t know we had a term for that in the first place; and I don’t see why we need one now. Why not just call them bathrooms? – looking at your later explanation, it’s a joint bathroom; it joins the two bedrooms and is used by both of them jointly. (And guests had better have access to more than a powder room, at least if any of them are ever going to stay overnight; they’re likely to want a shower or bath.)
Floor plans generally show dimensions.
There are multiple other reasons besides dimensions that one bedroom might be preferable to the other; though not all of them are preferable to the same people. (wolfpup named a couple.) So just knowing the size at first glance doesn’t tell parents whether there’s going to be an argument over who gets which bedroom.
And as Kimstu pointed out, all the people going on about ‘master’s degree’ and so on are ignoring the distinction between mastery over a trade or field of knowledge, and mastery over a person. “Master bedroom” implies that there’s a master of the house who’s in charge of lesser other humans. “Master’s degree” doesn’t.
But in any case the degree of commotion being made over suggesting renaming “master bedroom” strikes me as being absurd. Language changes all the time. Why aren’t the people up in arms about this complaining about all the language changes that have nothing to do with either gender or racial issues? Why don’t the people who think it’s absurd to be asked not to use ‘master and slave’ think it’s equally absurd to insist upon using them? You’re insisting on a specific term just as much as the people who don’t want you to use it are.
Yeah - but the specific design, where the bedrooms open to the hall, and the bathroom opens only to the adjoining bedrooms, makes it a little different. For example, in our old house, the hall bath on the 2d floor was the kids’ bathroom (we had an en suite) - but it clearly was not a Jack and Jill. I saw on-line references to it being like an en suite for TWO bedrooms.
Googling turned up 12.8 mill results, so it is not exactly uncommon. I wonder if it is at all regional?
But whether or not a listing includes a floor plan – particularly one that’s to scale or does include dimensions – is far from a given:
And listings that do include floor plans often include an embedded image that doesn’t print well, isn’t to scale on a monitor, and may be barely legible without additional manipulation.
Sure. Yeah. Of course.
But the suggestion I made really doesn’t have any downside, regardless of exactly how much upside it may have or may lack.
It’s one more tool to readily gather one more piece of information, and takes just about all of the potential ‘loading’ out of a bit of terminology.
It’s confusing to at least some people. In addition to the reaction quoted below:
I would actually wonder, especially if there’s no clear floor plan, whether there’s no access to 3b except through 3a. Maybe 3b’s really a large closet that the sellers want to consider a bedroom*; or some old houses did have a bedroom that was only accessible through another bedroom, probably used for children who the parents wanted to be sure weren’t sneaking out during the night.
*Don’t laugh. I looked at a whole lot of places when I was looking for this farm; and one of them advertised in the listing a ‘hall bedroom.’ I asked the real estate agent what a ‘hall bedroom’ was, and she had no idea. It turned out that the owners had an upstairs hall wide enough to fit a single bed into while still leaving it possible (just) to get through the hall to other bedrooms; and they had done so; and it looked like it was in use. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see somebody try the same thing with a walk-in closet.
I used to have an early model Prius. A knock from the reviewers was that the volume knob for the radio wasn’t visible to the driver. It was obscured by the steering wheel.
That was a problem exactly once – the first time you drove the car.
Would that happen to mean pajamas? Or perhaps one’s birthday suit?
Well, the kids’ bathroom in my grandmother’s house had exactly that design. It was actually sort of awkward, because you wanted to lock the other door when you were using it, and then needed to remember to unlock a door you never passed through when you were done. But i also liked the secret nature of it.
Anyway, that’s the only such bathroom I’ve ever seen and I’ve never felt i needed a name specifically for that type of bathroom. Heck, we don’t clearly distinguish between bathrooms that have a shower but no tub, a tub but no shower, and both a tub and a shower. That comes up a lot more often.
Out of curiosity: A friend has a bathroom with two doors, one to the game room and the other to a bedroom. And the game room is enormous – it contains a ping pong table, and has no closets, it is obviously not a bedroom. What would you call that?
Sounds like a den that was converted to a game room. Essentially the original ‘man cave’, but over the last 20+ years, they’ve kinda fallen out of favor, or at least the wood paneling was painted over.
Or, if the house is big enough to have a family room and living room, it may just be one of those, again, converted to a game room.
No, they just built the house recently, and it was designed to be a game room. And it’s WAY to big for me to think of it as a “den”. There’s lots of room around that ping pong table.
The house is enormous. It has another room with a pool table and a poker table, overlooking the family room. The giant “family room” is adjacent to the kitchen, and there are two rooms you might call the “living room”. Oh, and there’s a whole suite complete with a tiny kitchen and a sitting room for the owners (that has a bedroom and bathroom, too, of course.)
I’ve always thought it was odd that they built this bathroom between the game room and one of the guest bedrooms, and not with access to the hall.
It would certainly be a problem in a rental car, being driven by many people for the first time, and causing confusion for each of them.
People who own a car drive the same car over and over and over again. Most people buy a house only rarely.
And I gather Toyota changed that feature; presumably because it was, indeed, confusing.
Just how much of a safety issue are we discussing here – needing to move one’s head three inches to the right in order to see the volume knob for the radio – ?
Doesn’t one have a laundry list of items with which to familiarize themselves, and adjustments to make, every time they get behind the wheel of an unfamiliar car ?
I’ll equate that to the “Bedroom 3a vs. 3b” discussion in terms of potential harms done and the difficulty in scaling one’s way up that particular learning curve.
And each time they do, there are generally a nearly endless list of things they have to learn – possibly things that have changed since the last time they bought a house. New features, new terminology, new technology, new markets, new prices, new school systems, and on and on, ad infinitum.
They generally either learn these things on their own or they learn it from websites and/or real estate professionals.
This would just be something like that, except it’s exceedingly trivial and the effort required to internalize it is less than a rounding error in the home-buying process.
Not until the next major model revision, after six years, when nearly every single aspect of the car changed.
It’s in pretty common use in the Northeast US.
I agree with that part, anyway.
I’ve heard Jack-and-Jill bathroom for what seems like forever. I’m in SoCal.
I first heard en suite a lot when I was in England in the 80s. Probably because we were staying in B&B’s, and an en suite was an upgrade of sorts. I like the term better than “attached bathroom.” It’s easier to say (for me).
Is it? I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before today - and I know I’ve never seen one. But I’ve also always lived in neighborhoods where most of the houses were built damn near 100 years ago and have rarely even seen an en suite.