Before technology enabled us to say we need to “use the bathroom” or “use the toilet” or “use the facilities” or whatever, what did people say? Particularly if they didn’t use vulgarities like “piss” and “shit.” Would a Proper Lady tell her maid she needs to “defecate”? Would a small child tell her parent she needs to “urinate”?
“Ma, I need to use the outhouse.”
“Milady, here is the chamberpot you requested.”
“I need to relieve myself”
Also, it may be that words like “piss” and “shit” were considered as vulgar in the past as they are now.
I’ve read “necessary” used for the bathroom, as in “I need to make use of the necessary”
I’m not sure what the early American terminology would have been, but people have always had a wide variety of euphemisms; they didn’t use the clinical terms in everyday conversation. “Pluck a rose” was sometimes used in Elizabethan England, an era when privies were typically located in the garden. (And “privy” of course is itself a euphemism, originally an adjective meaning “private.”)
Even earlier than that (1430s), Margery Kempe describes how her elderly and senile husband reached a point where he “could not do his own easement to go to a sege [chamberpot],” but instead “voided his natural digestion” wherever he happened to be sitting. (This is an era when “shit” and “piss” weren’t even all that vulgar – these are words that get used in court poetry and religious drama – but Margery, an upper-middle-class woman writing a religious text, clearly wanted that extra level of gentility.)
To see a man about a dog or horse or duck is an idiom, especially British, of apology for one’s imminent departure or absence, generally to euphemistically conceal one’s true purpose, such as going to use the toilet or going to buy a drink.
The phrase dates from 1866, when most people didn’t have private bathrooms, but that may be later than the OP wanted.
In America, I’ve read “horse” used, never a dog or duck.
“Pay a visit to Mrs. Jones” is also Victorian era.
In the records of the Salem witch trials, someone reported that he had been cursed by a witch not to cacare or micturare (not to poop or pee). the Latin words were the ones the court substituted for whatever it was the witness actually said. So I can’t tell you what the 1692 common terms were, but I can give you the 1692 legal euphemism.
I strongly suspect the commonly used term for “pee” was simply “piss”. Shakespeare used the word frequently in his plays, for example, and there are plenty of examples right up to the present day.
I don’t know about common terms for poop, but I do point out that “excrement” itself is something of a euphemism – Elizabethans sometimes used it to refer to anything coming out of the body, including hair and fingernails.
When I’m camping and I need to go out into the woods and dig a hole, I say “got a little business to take care of”.
The Talmud (circa 1600 years ago) refers to an outhouse as a beit kisay, which can be translated literally as “chair house”, but I prefer the more vernacular “throne room”.
The ancient Greeks had different words for the excrement of humans and animals, but the common word, which survives to this day in some circles, is “kakka”
This may be a response more appropriate for Cafe Society than for FQ, but a character in the musical Oklahoma!, dazzled by the technology of Kansas City, mentioned that “you can walk to privies in the rain and never wet your feet”, suggesting that privies was used as a euphemism, as mentioned earlier in this thread.
This is not entirely on point, but Thomas Jefferson referred to the bathrooms at Monticello as “air closets”
(The same cite references bathrooms as “privies”, “necessaries” - noted above - and also as “little houses”)
And in some parts of the world we still talk about the “smallest room in the house” or the “little girls/boys room” - the concept hasn’t changed, just the location of the structure.
Another common euphemism used in the Middle Ages and Renaissance was Seige, which simply means “chair” (as in the Seige Perilous of Arthurian legend). It’s basically the “segge” that Fretful Porpentine refers to above.
I think that is common as I’ve heard it w/o the words ‘a little’. This evolved in my group of backpackers to ‘I have a business meeting’. Some other common hiking ones as separation, I got a call, and to answer a call (of nature). I think the call ones went away with increasing use of cellphones, however using call of nature is still acceptable.
“Use the pissoir” although that isn’t much of an euphemism.
A two years’ journal in New York has
…Trees and Plants do undoubtedly, tho’ insensibly suck in and digest into their own growth and composition, those subterraneous Particles and Exhalations, which otherwise wou’d be attracted by the heat of the Sun and so become matter for infectious Clouds and malign Atmospheres, and tho we cannot rely upon these causes as permanent and continuing, for the longer and the more any Country is peopled, the more unhealthful it may prove, by reason of Jaques [jakes], Dunghills and other excrementitious stagnations, which offend and annoy the bodies of Men, by incorporating with, and infecting the circumambient Air…
One of the characters in the 1967 western Hombre refers to “the public convenience”. I don’t know whether that referred to an outhouse, or a latrine.
In a scene in the 2010 “True Grit” remake (which takes place in Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma c. 1880), a teenage girl, a lawman, and Rooster Cogburn (whatever he’s supposed to be) are camping in the wilderness. They wake up in the morning and the girl asks the lawman where Rooster is, and the lawman says he’s “[something something] his morning constitutional,” which I took to mean he was taking his morning dump.
“Make water” as a euphemism for urination goes back to Middle English.