#1062 Potty

You reach an age where you hear someone say something you yourself have said for years, or you remember hearing first when you were a child, and you ask yourself, why do we say that?
Like did you ever notice that we have cheesecake and various types of meat pies, but we never have meat cake? It’s not that many things don’t qualify as being cake, like kidney pie and shepherd’s pie, it’s just that we never call it cake if it’s associated with meat. Hamburger cake? Nope, hamburger pie.
Beefcake? Well...only if the chefs are named Chip and Dale.
So the other day when I heard a lady asking her three-year-old if she wanted to “go potty” I started to wonder. “Go potty.” It doesn’t even get the grammar right. Go to the potty.
I think the toddler is capable of understanding the correct way to say it. You don’t say to your child, “Do you want to go grandma?” “Do you want to go store?”
But you do say, “Do you want to go play?” So maybe the “go potty” means potty is the act itself, not the pot you do it in. The pot is not the potty, the potty is the action in the pot.
Then “go potty” makes more grammatical sense. So by extension, other phrases could reflect both a thing’s objective quality and the action performed upon them. Instead of using the lawn mower to cut the lawn, I could “go lawnmower.” Instead of walking through a door, I could “go door.” Politicians go “doorbelling” so there’s some precedent for this.
And instead of getting in my car and going driving I can now simply “go car.” Which sounds more fun because it sounds like a go-cart.
“I like it when we go car like this, Honey”
“Me too, by the way, turn here, we need to go store. I want to buy some new pots so we can go crabby.”
“That reminds me, I have to go potty.”
“Not here on the side of the road, that’s illegal.”
“But Honey, it’s like the song says, ‘We need to fight, for the right, to potty...’”
America, ya gotta love it.