Latrinalia is a type of deliberately inscribed marking made on latrine

Latrine

A latrine is a communal facility containing one or more commonly many toilets which may be simple pit toilets or in the case of the United States Armed Forces any toilet including modern flush toilets...

s: that is, bathrooms or lavatory (restroom) walls. It can take the form of art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

, drawing

Drawing

Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...

s, or word

Language

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

s, including poetry

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

 and personal reflections. Other types of Latrinalia include political commentary as well as derogatory comments and pictures. When done without the property

Property

Property is any physical or intangible entity that is owned by a person or jointly by a group of people or a legal entity like a corporation...

 owner's consent

Consent

Consent refers to the provision of approval or agreement, particularly and especially after thoughtful consideration.- Types of consent :*Implied consent is a controversial form of consent which is not expressly granted by a person, but rather inferred from a person's actions and the facts and...

, it constitutes vandalism

Vandalism

Vandalism is the behaviour attributed originally to the Vandals, by the Romans, in respect of culture: ruthless destruction or spoiling of anything beautiful or venerable...

. Some venues have attempted to curb such vandalism by installing in the restrooms large blackboard

Blackboard

A chalkboard is a reusable writing surface.Blackboard may also refer to:* Blackboards are synonymous with "boards of infamy", an element of agitation-propaganda in the Soviet Union in 1930s, coincidental with Holodomor...

s and providing free chalk

Chalk

Chalk is a soft, white, porous sedimentary rock, a form of limestone composed of the mineral calcite. Calcite is calcium carbonate or CaCO3. It forms under reasonably deep marine conditions from the gradual accumulation of minute calcite plates shed from micro-organisms called coccolithophores....

; it is hoped that patrons will avail themselves of the blackboard and chalk rather than applying their latrinalia directly to the walls or toilet stalls.

Etymology

The late Alan Dundes

Alan Dundes

Alan Dundes, was a folklorist at the University of California, Berkeley. His work was said to have been central to establishing the study of folklore as an academic discipline. He wrote 12 books, both academic and popular, and edited or co-wrote two dozen more...

, a folklorist at Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, coined the term latrinalia in 1966 to refer to graffiti

Graffiti

Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....

 found in restrooms. Dundes preferred it over the term shithouse poetry, as not all latrinalia is in verse or poetic form.

The word is derived from the compounding

Compound (linguistics)

In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the word formation that creates compound lexemes...

 of latrine (or toilet) and the suffix

Affix

An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...

 -alia, which signifies a worthless collection of something — in this case bathroom writings.

External links

• From The Bathroom Wall - A blog about bathroom graffiti and other humorous topics
• Latrinalia (e Bathroom Graffiti) — Electronic Bathroom Graffiti uploads from around the world.
• Bathroom Graffiti — Bathroom Graffiti by author and photographer Mark Ferem
• Bathroom Graffiti Project — features and rates hundreds of photos of latrinalia from around the world
• Latrinalia — features galleries of bathroom graffiti
• Raina Williams, Content analysis: Latrinalia, Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis
  University of California, Davis
  The University of California, Davis is a public teaching and research university established in 1905 and located in Davis, California, USA. Spanning over , the campus is the largest within the University of California system and third largest by enrollment...
  
  
• Mark Ferem, Latrinalia: "It's all in The Head", 50mm Los Angeles
• Matt Schneider, Stall Wall, an ethnography on latrinalia
• Bathroom Graffiti Blog
• Origins of Bathroom Graffiti Documentary
• The Writing on the Stall