h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Curators, can we get the title here changed: A972290

"Bog roll" is a desperately trying to be funny affectation, whereas "Toilet roll" is far more understandable by everyone

Done.

This worries me.

Why?

Fine word. Appears in the OED. Slang but not vulgar (as opposed to the verbal form of 'bog' from which it ultimately derives - the OED describes this as 'A low word, scarcely found in literature, however common in coarse colloquial language.')

Dr Johnson defined 'bog-house' as "A privy, 'a house of office'".

We lose all of this stuff when we start bowdlerising our language.

It's not to make it more respectable, but to make it more understandable. I'm sure there are many readers who wouldn't know what "bog-roll" meant. And these people deserve to be able to read about which way up to put their rolls, even if they don't know British slang.

I think that misses the point. This isn't an instructional entry; it's an amusing article. The large number of collaborative authors ascribed to it would surely have been happy with that title, and I would be surprised if there weren't a few Americans among them. And in the unlikely event that they didn't, it's not that it doesn't make it clear very quickly in both literal and pictorial form.

Why not add a footnote on the first reference in the main text if it's such a problem?

We have readers from more countries than the UK and US Icy

Use of bog in the entry, yeah why not, that's the amusing part. Although personally I don't find that very funny. But the title shows up in lots of places and does count towards the search engine stuff too, so toilet roll is much better

Cheers Gnomon

I agree with Icy on this one with regard to bowdlerising DISCLAIMER: My name is in the list of Researchers, although I honestly have no idea what I contributed to it.

Bog-roll is a British slang term, but then we're a British-founded and -based website, plus we're supposed to have a reputation for being less than serious, compared to some. There's a picture in the entry as well as references to toilet roll so there shouldn't be any confusion for people not familiar with the term, and the suggestion of adding a footnote is a fine idea. An even better one is a section in the entry about the term. As long as there are mentions of toilet roll in the entry any search engine will find it, including ours. The idea that people can't understand what the entry is about if they're not familiar with British slang terms seems like a red herring to me. The entry already makes it very clear.

Any editors around to offer an opinion?

Using bog-roll in the entry would be a good compromise, and if anyone can contribute a brief description/history of the term so much the better

I wonder if having 'toilet' in the title makes it more likely to pop up in a google search.

Perhaps Pastey can enlighten me.

Why do we have to pander to that bloody 'turns up in a google search' argument all the time?

By all means choose your titles carefully to optimise this, but not at the expense of completely changing the entry. If you read it, it's all about earthy things like wiping techniques. Putting Bog in the title basically describes the content and prepares the reader far better than Toilet ever could.

Icy, you know we're doing what we can to optimise the site, and you know how a carefully chosen title can make a big difference.

No-one's going through sterilizing the Guide, we lost too many of the amusing stub entries that way.