Why Do Outhouses Have a Crescent Moon on the Door? (And the Literal Deadliest Flatulence in History)

thanks dude Dollar Shave Club for sponsoring this video go dude dollarshaveclub.com forward slash brain food to get your starter set for just five dollars more on them in a bit [Music] literally everybody asks why are outhouses traditionally depicted with a crescent moon on the door in all the years we've been answering questions from our abnormally attractive viewers one thing has popped up in our inbox and comment section more time than anything else and that's what's the deal with crescent moons on outhouse doors well after nearly a decade of doing this we finally decided to look into it so here we go while it's commonly stated in a shocking number of otherwise seemingly authoritative sources including no less than a book called outhouses a 128 page guide to all things outhouse that the origin of the crescent moon on the outhouse is century Souls however the truth is that all evidence seems to indicate that it's an extremely modern phenomenon as to this commonly touted relatively ancient origin this is purportedly all to do with gender for example in outhouses it's claimed that it's a widely held historical view that the crescent moon is a holdover from a time when illiteracy was rife supposedly before the adoption of the more familiar male and female bathroom symbols it was common to use a crescent moon to denote that an outhouse was for women and a Sun to denote that it was an outhouse for men this is supposedly a nod to the fact that women have long been associated with the moon and and supposedly with the Sun from here opinion is divided on why the crescent moon is the de facto symbol on the outhouse with perhaps the most common explanation being that men's outhouses fell into disrepair because men would just do their business in the great outdoors as God intended without the need of such an enclosure thus only the woman's out houses were left regularly used and others went the way of the dodo as you might have guessed from the number of supposedly as I just said there is absolutely no evidence supporting that being the origin of the crescent moon on outhouses and in fact the evidence we do have seems to indicate that that hypothesis is about as accurate as the contents of that political chain letter forwarded to you by great-grandmother so what does the evidence at hands actually show first not just the something that the Crescent Moon idea just wasn't a thing predating the 20th century at all and in fact it wouldn't be until around the mid 20th century where the Crescent Moon part of that duo started to gain some traction well past the days when outhouses were commonly used while some of the more traveled among you might now be pointing to historic sites in the United States you have visited that have outhouses that have been there going back potentially even a couple of hundred years and feature a crescent moon cut out it should be noted that in every known instance the cutouts were put there in modern times to fit people's expectations as one dr. Adam Brooke Davis of Truman State University in the Missouri folklore society states these are all examples of historical retrofitting of course as you might expect descriptions of outhouses and photographs and the like are relatively rare and surviving examples even more so as for those surviving examples that have not been retrofitted we have such cases as an eight-person communal outhouse on the thomas Leiper estate this 18th century outhouse is helpfully made of stone so it has survived the centuries but no such cut out or symbology is present anywhere on it door otherwise other similar surviving examples went not historically retrofitted likewise are lacking any crescent moon or Sun to be seen anywhere as for the earliest known documented mention of this Sun Moon dichotomy if outhouses to mark whether it was for someone of the male or female persuasion this doesn't get a mention until the 1972 book the little red schoolhouse a sketch book of early American education in its it claims the woodshed was often a lean-to attached the schoolhouse but the most accepted arrangement was to place it between the schoolhouse and the privy with a fence separating the boys entrance from the girls the ancient designation of Privy doors was to soar into the may son for the boys toilet and a moon for the girls toilet naturally this description is considered somewhat suspect on that point and indeed one of the oldest photographs of an outhouse dates back to 1917 and shows a picture of a girl's outhouse at an American school before and after renovation with neither version having any such cutouts anywhere as well dr. Davis sums up turning his extensive research into the matter I have never seen a crescent moon shape in an actual outhouse I could confidently date to earlier than about 1960 on that note as for the first known actual instances of the crescent moon cut out on outhouses as alluded to these wouldn't start showing up until around the mid 20th century first in cartoons and comics for example if you troll through examples of old linen postcards from the 1930s to the 1950s you'll see that on the 1930s side of things depictions of outhouses in said humorous postcards had no crescent moon adornment bartson later examples this seemingly became ubiquitous weather on the door above it or on the upper parts of the sidewalls of the outhouse okay so who came up with the crescent moon trope and why well this isn't clear historically outhouses did frequently feature openings in the rafters for ventilation and light purposes some even had cutouts in the doors but often diamonds V or heart-shaped or some speculate on this one originally intended to be more bottom shelters it would look like hanging over the hole these door cutouts were also seemingly for ventilation and light purposes and also sometimes thought function as the door handle of sorts as the after mentioned dr. Davis sums up concerning the door cutouts my grandparents farm near Hannibal Missouri has an outhouse Mills between 1920 and 1940 the door has faced from the outside had its hinges left and no knob or pull rather it had a cutout so that one could slip ones fingers in to grasp it if emitted light ventilation and easy opening I suggest the simple expedience came to have some traditional force and once Hardware became available was still felt to be useful or attractive and was displaced to the center of the door to break up the flat plain of course if this is correct it still doesn't explain why the crescent moon cart house is the one latched onto by popular media in the United States and later beyond vs. other options or even whether the popular media is actually the one that first created it for that let us offer our own little hypothesis while nobody knows for sure because the crescent moon trope seems to have originated not on real outhouses but rather in various comics or other humor based media around the mid century in the United States crabs it may have been referencing the practice of dropping your drawers and hanging your butt over something a he a mooning someone only 99 percent speculation the timing of this revolution of outhouse design seems to line up exceptionally well for this to have been the case before we get into that going back a couple of thousand years we have the first known reference of someone disrespecting someone else via mooning them this was documented by Flavius Josephus in 80 ad in his the Jewish war where he records an events that apparently took place near the Temple in Jerusalem a few decades earlier one of the soldiers pulled back his garment and cowering down after an indecent manner turned his breech to the Jews and spake such words as you might expect upon such a posture after this the whole multitude had indignation and made a clamor to cue - that he would punish the soldier while the rash apart of the youth and such as were naturally the most tumultuous fell to fighting and caught up stones and threw them at the soldiers upon which commonness was afraid lest all the people should make an assault upon him and sent to call for more arms men who when they came in great numbers into The Cloisters the Jews were in a very great consternation and being beaten out of the temple they ran into the city hands the violence with which they crowded to get out was so great that they trod upon each other and squeezed one another till ten thousand of them were killed in so much that this feast became the cause of mourning to the whole nation and every family lamented their own relations so yes the first known mooning in recorded history apparently not only included a fart in the general direction of someone but resulted in a riot and the death of reportedly over ten thousand people from this fact we're going to go ahead and crown this the deadliest fart in history and we challenge you to come up with one to beat it moving swiftly on as to the association with the moon and mooning someone this goes back to at least the 18th century in England most person into the topic at hands leading up to and during the mid 20th century mooning became an extremely common slang term in the United States for the practice of dropping your drawers and waggling your buttocks of people right when the crescent moon seems to have made its debut as the symbol on outhouses in comedic media and as to why the crescent moon bother than a full if our most speculative I bother is correct with yes because a circle isn't so apparently representative of a moon Maz is a crescent moon nor as accurate a depiction of a butt crack which is presumably how the association between butts and the moon came to be in the first place way back in merry old England whatever the case to sum up in out houses that did have cutouts in the doors historically it would appear these were generally for ventilation and illumination purposes and to function as a door handle when placed on the door contrary to what is popularly reported the crescent moon cutout does not seem to have been a thing historically and rather seems to be a media generated or at least popularized invention and we're speculating the various humorous outlets who seem to have started this settled on the crescent moon in their drawings as the cutout of choice in such comedic drawings to fittingly represent someone's exposed butt crack in this case hanging over a hole in the ground not too dissimilar from one of the other most popular cutouts for out houses the fictitious hot shape now over time we've all upgraded our bathroom experience going from an outdoor to an indoor affair and now it's time for you to upgrade another part of that experience with today's sponsor Dollar Shave Club and I want to tell you about them just before we get into the bonus fact today Dollar Shave Club covers all of your grooming needs shower oral care deodorants and most importantly shaving now I don't shave my beard but I do shave my head and that experience has become so much easier since switching to Dollar Shave Club and using their high quality blades Dollar Shave Club sent me their ultimate starter set which I've got right here the razor of blade razor and blades of course come with it there's the prep scrub you use before hands there's the shave butter that you used during there's the post shave do that you use afterwards I like this post shave do I have a after I've shaved my head tends to get a bit dry this helps keep me hydrated so I visit dollarshaveclub.com forward slash brain food and get the ultimate shave starter set for just $5 and round out your grooming routine by adding any of their other high-quality products as well after that the restock box ships full size products at the regular price and let's get into that boner fact ever wonder why the toilet is sometimes called the John well wonder no more the term is thought to derive from Sir John Harington or at the least to have been popularized due to Harrington there are a few references of the toilets being called cousin John as well as many references to it being called Jake and other Sandridge generic names before Harrington was born but it is generally agreed that why we now call it John is because of Harrington and not because of cousin John Sir John Harington lived in the late 16th and early 17th centuries Harrington was one of the hundred and to God children of Queen Elizabeth first known as the saucy god son for his proclivity to write some water escape poetry and other writings which often got him banished only to be allowed to return some time later along with writing several notable works Harrington also devised Britain's first flushing toilet which he called the Ajax this derived from the term Jakes which was a slang term of what we now call a toilet shortly thereafter Harrington wrote one of his more famous and popular works titled a new discourse upon a stale subject the metamorphosis of Ajax this on the surface was about his new invention but more to the point was a political allegory on the Turkish excrement that was poisoning the state the book itself got him banished from the court for a time due to its allusions to the Earl of Leicester however the actual flushing toilet device itself was real and was installed in his home and later one was made for the Queen around 1596 the device worked by pulling a cords that would allow water to rush in from the water closet which would flush away the waste although Harrington wasn't by any means the first to invent a flushing toilet there are references to flushing toilets going all the way back to 2600 BC his invention was an innovation in Britain at the time and it was commonly thought that he was the inventor of the flushing toilet which is why it is thought the flushing toilet today is often called a John incidentally Sir John Harington is also remembered for his political epigram treason doth never prosper what's the reason why if prosper none dare call it treason so I really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do smash now thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe don't forget to check it off a fantastic sponsor Dollar Shave Club link below and thank you for watching

Channel: Today I Found Out

Views: 1,710,725

Rating: 4.8744569 out of 5

Keywords: today i found out, tifovidz12, tifo, awesome, facts, didn't know, Outhouse Moon, Crescent Moon on the Door, Crescent Moons in Their Doors, Reason Outhouses Had Moons

Id: J_HehTDrbdI

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 07 2020