At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

The small rooms off the bedchamber were used for every sort of private purpose, from defecation to assignation, so the words for these rooms have come down to us in a curiously fractured fashion. Closet, Mark Girouard tells us in Life in the English Country House, had “a long and honourable history before descending to final ignominy as a large cupboard or a room for the housemaid’s sink and mops.” Originally, a closet was more like a study than a storeroom. Cabinet, originally a diminutive form of cabin, by the mid-1500s had come to signify a case where valuables were kept. Very soon after that—in only a decade or so—it had come to mean the room itself. The French, as so often, refined the original concept into a variety of room types, so that by the eighteenth century a large French château might have a cabinet de compagnie, a cabinet d’assemblée, a cabinet de proprieté, and a cabinet de toilette in addition to a plain cabinet. In England the cabinet became the most exclusive and private of all chambers—the innermost sanctum where the most private meetings could take place. Then it made one of those bizarre leaps that words sometimes make and came to describe (by 1605) not just where the king met with his ministers, but the collective term for the ministers themselves. This explains why this one word now describes both the most intimate and exalted group of advisers in government and the shelved recess in the bathroom where we keep Ex-Lax and the like.