As illustrated in my previous posts on the speech of the Rocky Mountains, the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR) provides plenty of evidence that the hills are alive with the sound of lexical variation. In today's post, I look at this kind of variation as it relates to different terms used for outhouse that were offered by native speakers of English in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming during their interviews for the Linguistic Atlas of the Western States (from 1988 to 2004).

First, a little about question types in LAMR, since the one that elicited outhouse variants from informants is of a different type than the questions used to elicit the responses that we looked at in earlier posts. For instance, the questions used to target variants for gutters, orphan lambs, aspen, and moonshine were rather straightforward questions often used in Atlas-style interviewing; to elicit moonshine, for instance, it was common for fieldworkers to simply ask a question, such as, "What do people in this area call illegal liquor?" Variants of canning, however, were not targeted by the LAMR worksheets, but they simply emerged from conversations in the interviews pertaining to preserving fruits and vegetables grown in the garden. Variants of outhouse, however, were typically the product of a type of prompt called a "shotgun question", which is an open-ended question intended to get the informant to give a broad range of answers that the fieldworker can then break down, ask for clarification for specific items in the list, etc.

The general form of the question that outhouse variants appeared as a response to was "What kinds of buildings did you have on your ranch (or farm)?" Because outhouse was not an explicit LAMR target, there was rarely a follow-up prompt for it; rather, it either appeared in the lists of responses to the shotgun question regarding outside buildings on the ranch or it didn't. Thus, of the 70 LAMR informants, only 28 informants mentioned this item. However, since informants could offer multiple responses, a total of 47 tokens of outhouse were provided by informants, covering 16 types, as illustrated in the figure below:

As shown, outhouse(s) was the highest-ranking variant with 15 uses in the collection, followed by toilet(s), and outside toilet(s), before ending in a relatively long lists of oncers and twofers. 

We've seen these relatively large sets for items before in LAMR -- in fact, almost everything we've looked at -- which suggests that this is simply a very common property of language, or of our way of looking at language. And we've also seen before that variation in the artifact itself can lead to lexical variation, which certainly could in this case be the motivation for such variants as two-holer, two-seater, and star house. However, we also have to consider the role that avoidance, and the creation of euphemisms that allow people to avoid going on-record with certain taboo topics, plays in cases of lexical variation. And if you find if far-fetched that avoidance would play much of a role in a concept as benign as outhouse, which room of your home or office building do you know the most terms for? And is the term that is selected to use for that term in any given situation dictated by whether the people using it are adults or children; strangers, co-workers, old friends; spouses or first dates; guests for a dinner party or for poker night?

For a word search on these terms, click here.