[Idiom] gotta go number 2

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Noran

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Hello guys,
I just saw this expression : "I gotta go number two".Does anyone know the meaning of it?
 

Barb_D

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It's something a child would say.

To go "number one" is to urinate, and to go "number two" is to defecate.

Another way to say this, suitable for someone the same age: I have to poo.

Adults in the US do not specify what activity is required when using the toilet. They just excuse themselves and take care of it.
 

Noran

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Thank you Barb D :)
 

MiaCulpa

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Hi, the information Barb_D gives is certainly correct. If you were wondering about the origins of the expression, I have been told by older people that it evolved from past school customs.

Before indoor restrooms were common in schools, children would signal to be excused to use the outdoor restroom (called an "outhouse") by raising either one finger or two fingers. The teacher then excused the child but expected him or her to return quickly if only one finger had been raised. Naturally, two fingers would mean the teacher could expect the child to be delayed longer. This was important information for the teacher, not only to maintain discipline, but also to know when to check on a long-delayed (and unattended) child.

A reference to the custom ("number one" or "number two") is still used by children, it is true. It is also used by adults speaking to children (and also by some adults in certain situations where time or privacy are of critical importance), although the custom itself of raising fingers eventually disappeared when outdoor restrooms were no longer used.
 
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Rover_KE

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I never knew that, MiaCulpa. Very interesting.

Welcome to the board.

Rover
 

MiaCulpa

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Thanks, Rover KE. I love etymologies and the interplay between custom and language. Some years ago, I enjoyed volunteering for an ESL/TESOL class, and I was delighted to find this site!
 

NikkiBarber

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Noran, I see that you live in Denmark and those same expressions are sometimes used in Danish as well.
 

Ouisch

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Hi, the information Barb_D gives is certainly correct. If you were wondering about the origins of the expression, I have been told by older people that it evolved from past school customs.

Before indoor restrooms were common in schools, children would signal to be excused to use the outdoor restroom (called an "outhouse") by raising either one finger or two fingers. The teacher then excused the child but expected him or her to return quickly if only one finger had been raised. Naturally, two fingers would mean the teacher could expect the child to be delayed longer. This was important information for the teacher, not only to maintain discipline, but also to know when to check on a long-delayed (and unattended) child.

A reference to the custom ("number one" or "number two") is still used by children, it is true. It is also used by adults speaking to children (and also by some adults in certain situations where time or privacy are of critical importance), although the custom itself of raising fingers eventually disappeared when outdoor restrooms were no longer used.


It always pains me to disagree with a poster, but I'm a professional research editor and I just can't help myself. The first recorded use of "number two" as a euphemism for defecation was in 1902, some 60 years after indoor plumbing had become the norm in most U.S. schools. The outhouse explanation is actually an urban legend. :-(
 

birdeen's call

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It always pains me to disagree with a poster, but I'm a professional research editor and I just can't help myself. The first recorded use of "number two" as a euphemism for defecation was in 1902, some 60 years after indoor plumbing had become the norm in most U.S. schools. The outhouse explanation is actually an urban legend. :-(
What is the real explanation? I'm curious because we use the same expression in Polish...
 

MiaCulpa

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It always pains me to disagree with a poster, but I'm a professional research editor and I just can't help myself. The first recorded use of "number two" as a euphemism for defecation was in 1902, some 60 years after indoor plumbing had become the norm in most U.S. schools. The outhouse explanation is actually an urban legend. :-(

Please don't be pained on my account, because you've provided me with an interesting amateur research project now. ;-) I usually confine my research to fiction-writing projects these days, but I'm enough of a "geek" to enjoy a good hunt.

I will gladly accept the word of a professional researcher that the first recorded use of the term was in 1902. And I'm willing to entertain the possibility that school houses across the Northeast U.S. and in American metropolitan areas all did indeed have indoor plumbing in the 1840s, but I'm interested in the rest of the country in that era, given that America's populace was still largely agrarian then. I know from personal experience with my grandparents' (seasonally freezing or sweltering) outhouse in the 1960s that indoor plumbing reached rural areas long after that. The last of my "deep-hills" (meaning geographically isolated by low mountains) relatives acquired indoor plumbing in the late 1970s.

I was careful to attribute the "source" of the information I had been given to "older people" because I was aware I did not have academically sound sources for the subject. The people in question, though, are my parents (born 1929 and 1939) and grandparents (born early 1900s), who had all attended one-room school houses in the Ozark mountains (a region in America's upper South), and who had all used the one- or two-finger signals themselves. In the 1950s, when my mother first attended an actual high school in an oh-so-small "town," it was her first regular access to indoor plumbing. They all were under the impression that the origins of the expression are as I relayed above, though confusing correlation for causation is an easy enough mistake for people far more educated than those generations of my family were. In any case, teachers used the information gleaned to estimate how long to wait to check on an "excused" child. So whether the hand gestures gave way to a descriptive verbalization, or whether the two are separate phenomena is an interesting question.

With Polish and Danish posters mentioning that the same expression is found in their own languages, it seems quite possible that the expression (and/or possibly original or related finger signals) is much older than this country. Another possibility is that some shared cultural event brought the expression (and/or finger signals?) to multiple countries in more recent times. Given that no one here seems aware of such an event, that seems less likely to me, although I'm interested in what the record will show. Please, please share whatever else you find on this topic. I'm also curious as to whether the elderly in Poland and Denmark remember using or have heard of others using the one-finger of two-finger signals to be allowed to use the "restroom" in non-urban schools. :)
 
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NikkiBarber

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I have never researched this, but it seems to me that the expression is mostly used by younger people in Denmark which makes me think that we have simply picked up on it from all the American culture that we are exposed to. I might be wrong, though.
 

MiaCulpa

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I was (a bit too) excited to discover that during the "Great Depression" (as the international economic collapse during the 1930s was called here), the U.S. federal government's Works Progress Administration (WPA) funded the construction of concrete outhouses for a number of public schools. Since the verbal expression, "number two" was found in print by 1902, the finger signals and the verbal phrase appear to have coexisted for at least fifty years--at least in some areas of the U.S.--before the finger signals became extinct. I'm now trying to track down where I remember coming across a reference to the finger signals being used in a military context. (Oh dear. This may be becoming something of a scatological interest for me. ;-))
 
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hotmetal

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I, too, love to hear these sort of explanations and etymologies. It's part of what makes language so fascinating. From personal experience I have never heard of there being a code for the intended bodily function, you either needed to be excused or you didn't. And if it was for a 'number two', you'd try to run and get back quickly so people wouldn't know which you'd been doing!

On the original question though, I had always thought (perhaps wrongly), that the origin of this was just a euphemistic one. That is to say, "number two" meant "poo" because it rhymed but wasn't a taboo word, while "number one" meant "wee" simply by a process of elimination (no pun intended!)

I can't see a big problem arising from the fact that indoor plumbing was in widespread use well before the first recorded use of the phrase. I mean, just because the toilet block is now indoors instead of outdoors doesn't mean the teacher no longer 'needs' this information. It's not like the cubicles were located at the back of the classroom from 1860 onwards, they still must have been down the corridor at least…
 
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MiaCulpa

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I can't see a big problem arising from the fact that indoor plumbing was in widespread use well before the first recorded use of the phrase. I mean, just because the toilet block is now indoors instead of outdoors doesn't mean the teacher no longer 'needs' this information. It's not like the cubicles were located at the back of the classroom from 1860 onwards, they still must have been down the corridor at least…

Glad to meet a fellow word "geek" in the room! Discovering the overlap between the custom and the apparently related phrase was to find out more about a proposition made by a professional research editor--that most American schools had indoor toilets by the 1840s--which seems not necessarily to apply to the large rural parts of the country. She seemed to be saying that since outdoor restrooms allegedly disappeared in the 1840s and that the first printed reference to "number two" occurred in 1902, there could be no relationship between the phenomena. I've been trying to find out if that were true.

Meanwhile, I recently heard a horrifying story (that also made me laugh) while relaxing after Christmas dinner. A boy in my stepfather's class in the 1930s used the finger signal that indicated "number two" and was gone a slightly longer time than usual. Weather conditions are very extreme in many parts of the U.S., especially in winter, and it was deathly cold. The teacher went to check on the child after perhaps 20 minutes.

The WPA (see above) had built the school's outhouse to adult specifications, and the child had fallen in! He was holding his arms straight out to suspended himself over the deep (and disgustingly deadly) pit below him. He could have died if the teacher hadn't checked on him. Conditions in some parts of this country remained primitive longer than those found in many other Western countries, apparently, and bears and snakes were possible dangers for children leaving the safety of the school house alone as well.
 

NikkiBarber

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I always seen that expression too! But never know the meaning of it! But maybe it seems that they are acting like a hater... it's what I have understood for that.

:?::?::?:

I don't understand? Do you mean the expression "to go number 2"?
 

5jj

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The first recorded use of "number two" as a euphemism for defecation was in 1902, some 60 years after indoor plumbing had become the norm in most U.S. schools. The outhouse explanation is actually an urban legend. :-(
At the risk of going even further off-thread, I have to say that I am surprised that indoor plumbing had become the norm in most U.S. schools by the 1860s. In Britain, flush plumbing may have been in city schools in the 1860s, though some rural schools still had earth closets well into the 1960s. (The foulness of the atmosphere still comes to my mind at times,)

Even when schools had flush plumbing, lavatories were still frequently located either outside the main building, often in the old outhouses, or in fairly remote parts of the building.

The finger-signalling story may be an urban myth, but, the location of the lavatories or the type of plumbing or buckets would not necessarily prove this. The finger signals would give an indication of the time involved wherever the lavatories were, and however they functioned.
 

igor.rogi

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I never knew that, MiaCulpa. Very interesting.

Welcome to the board.

Rover

In Brazil we use the same sentence in Portuguese! It's kind of a universal expression! lol..

But remember, totally informal expressions... used with close friends or relatives...
 
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