29 July 2020
Let’s knock this one out right from the start. No, the word crap does not come from the name of Thomas Crapper. The word was in widespread use before the man was even born. But if not, where does it come from?
The origin is not known for certain. It’s probably from a borrowing from either French or Dutch, or perhaps a combination of the two. Both chrape, with the sense of rubbish or waste, and crappe, with the sense of chaff, are found in Anglo-Norman texts from the thirteenth century. These words may be based on the Old Norse skrapa, meaning to scrape, to erase, referring to leavings or scraps from the process. Norman French was heavily influenced by the Germanic Old Norse; the Normans after all come from the Norsemen.
In early modern Dutch, krappe could mean something cut or shaved off, such as a slice of meat or pastry. This word’s antecedents could have influenced the English word, or perhaps the English word influenced the Dutch usage. In any case, the early history of the word is muddled and likely will never be sorted out.
The earliest known English appearance of crap is in the manuscript London, British Library, Royal 17.C.17, a miscellany that contains grammatical and other texts. The manuscript was copied prior to 1425. A list of nouns pertaining to mills has this:
Hoc ordium, Ae barly.
Hec siligo, Ae rye.
Hoc sigalum, idem.
Hec curalis, Ae crappys.
Curalis is medieval Anglo-Latin for chaff.
Crap has been in continuous use to mean scraps or leavings of various sorts through to the nineteenth century, when it acquires the sense of excrement or feces. Here is an 1801 poem by J. Churchill titled “Seniority” that uses the word in a poem about officers using an outhouse:
Full speed to the garden, a Subaltern flew,
For that which by proxy we cannot well do;
When...lo!...not a little put to it, was he
Askaunce through the key-hole, his Major to see:
[...]
Just then (for his gambols, the devil will play)
A captain stepp’d forth; on the very same lay;
But, finding out who had already got there;
He, coolly, his paper began to prepare;
Just adding (for some only mind...number one)
“I...I shall go in, when the major has done:”
The Sub, who was, now, a most terrible plight, in;
And, not quite aware of...priority S——ING
Squeez’d awhile...”well!” says he, “then, the best friends must part;”
...Crap!...crap!...’twas a moist one! right Brewer’s ****!
The bowdlerized words are, of course, shitting and fart.
While the publisher didn’t feel the need to bowdlerize crap in that poem, it’s no surprise that this sense of the word is rare in nineteenth century publications. It does appear in the 1840s in Swell’s Night Guide, a guidebook to the brothels and other disreputable establishments of Victorian London. Green’s Dictionary of Slang gives a date of 1846; the edition I have access to is from 1849:
O! you’ll find a decent pad or two in this valk. But vot ever you does, don’t doss at that ere Trav’ler’s Rest—they calls it The Trav’ler’s Rest. Vhy, thunder me groggy! if any trav’ler gets rest there—why it is a reglar bug trap and a jumper valk and chat hutch, and stinks of crap and cag like a dunniken, and the donna of the ken is a dead crab, and a nark.
In the 1930s in American speech, crap took on the sense of anything cheap, worthless, or undesirable. For instance, Henry Miller’s 1934 novel Tropic of Cancer has this:
Can you picture her moving in here with her big trunks and her hatboxes and all that crap she drags around with her?
And James T. Farrell’s 1935 novel Judgment Day uses crap to mean insolence or abuse:
I got to have something to do, and dough in my pocket, and the feeling that I don't have to take nobody's crap.
So, is there any truth to the story about Thomas Crapper? There was such a man, and one can find Crapper-brand toilets in museums. Crapper lived from 1837–1910. He was in the plumbing supply business and he manufactured and sold toilets, among other plumbing fixtures. For a while he owned the patent for the Silent Valveless Water Waste Preventer, a device that enabled the toilet to flush when the tank was half full. He did not invent it, however. That credit goes to a man named Albert Giblin. His is a case of an aptronym, a personal name that is coincidentally apt. He may have contributed to the popularity of the word, but even so, it was already well established before he came along.
Sources:
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2006, s.v. crappe, chrape.
Churchill, J. Poems, vol. 2 of 2. London: W. Glindon, 1801, 129–30. Google Books.
Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. curallum, curallis. Brepolis: Database of Latin Dictionaries.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. crap n.1.
Middle English Dictionary, 2018, s.v. crap n.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2016, s.v. crap, n.1 and adj.
“The Traveller’s Rest.” Swell’s Night Guide. London: H. Smith, 1849, 68. London Low Life, Adam Matthew.
Wright, Thomas. Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabularies, vol. 1 of 2. Richard Paul Wülcker, ed. London: Trübner and Co., 1884, 666. HathiTrust Digital Archive.