The Bathroom Formula: A corpus-based study of a speech act in American and British English

•There is little creativity when speakers express their need to go to the bathroom.•There is little sociolinguistic variation.•Unobtrusiveness is an important aim.•The formula usually receives minimal responses.

This paper is a corpus-based study of the Bathroom Formula, a speech act that refers to the phrases speakers use to express their need to leave any ongoing activity in order to go to the bathroom (e.g., I’m gonna go to the bathroom). The data were retrieved from the Longman Spoken American Corpus, the Michigan Corpus of Spoken Academic English and the spoken component of the British National Corpus. More than 80 ‘anchor’ words and phrases found in the literature were searched for (e.g., loo, pee, wash my hands). The results show that a large majority of all instances are based on a small number of lexicalized sentence stems (I ((SEMI-)MODAL) V to the bathroom/loo/restroom/toilet; I ((SEMI-)MODAL) (go) pee/potty). It is argued that the lack of creativity is connected to ease of comprehension and production and to speakers’ wish to be unobtrusive. Apart from some lexical differences between the regional varieties (e.g., AmE bathroom and BrE loo) there was little sociolinguistic variation. The desire to be unobtrusive is also reflected in the responses to the formula: about half the tokens are not responded to at all, and the most common verbal response involves simple acknowledgements (e.g., okay).