Traverse City Record-Eagle

Betty Werth

February 1, 2009

Betty Werth: For toilets, it's all name

By BETTY WERTH

People frequently ask me where I get ideas for my columns.

After this one, you may not want to know.

Because this one is about toilets. I didn't get the idea there, though. It came to me at a local home store when my husband and I wandered past a display of sale toilets and they all had names. I had not thought about toilet names before, but it stands to reason that in the plumbing industry sinks and toilets and bathtubs, like all other products of various styles and specifications, need names for successful marketing. You can't call a toilet a T-112 or a C-A5 or some such, because there's no "feeling" in a name like that, and to sell well products need to make an emotional connection.

Yes, friends, we all need toilets, and toilets need names -- memorable, stirring, dignified names that help customers, walking down home store aisles or flipping through plumbing catalogs looking at rows of white commodes that look like almost identical big white porcelain eggs, zero in on something.

Except for a half-inch of tank height, or a rounder bowl shape, Toilet A looks like Toilets B, C, D and E. Yet Toilet A is called a "Devonshire," and to some of us that may be enough to close the lid on the "Waverly" (B), the "Willingham" (C), the "Arlington" (D) and the "Kelton" (pick a letter).

Most of the toilets Steve and I saw at the home store were named after villages in England (Mayfair, Hempsted) or institutes of higher learning (Oxford, Dartmouth). Not sure that was sufficiently representative, I rushed home to do 30 minutes of exhaustive internet research, broken only by a trip downstairs to visit the ... uh ... (I'm afraid I don't know its real name) and found roughly a third of the toilets I viewed on the Web had dignified Anglo-Saxon place names. I did, however, discover a few other toilet name categories amid the Web sites of plumbing supply companies, to wit:

-- Toilets named after women: "Kathryn," "Gabrielle," "Guinevere," "Gwyneth," "Carla."

-- Named after men: "Lloyd," "Clayton."

-- Named after practical considerations: "Spacesaver," "Flowise," "Neorest."

-- Named after the last place you'd be using one: "Town Square," "Promenade."

-- Named as if you'd won something: "Triumph," "Champion," "Titan."

-- Named as if you were using it for something unforgettable: "Memoirs," "Retrospect," "Reminiscence."

-- Named after sources of water: "Fountainhead," "Aegean," "Niagara." (Steve liked Niagara. He said it suggested a lot of flush power.)

I also found one named for a famous American document ("Constitution"), one for a famous American restaurant, ("Subway"), and one for a famous American presidential candidate ("Maverick").

Of course I could go on, and actually have, but that's enough about toilet names for now.

With a new president ensconced, a new Congress on the loose, Wall Street flush with tax money and the world economy circling the drain, we all have other things to think about. Next week's column: Name that sink.

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