How did the previous generation call "going to the toilet" to relieve themselves?

The word "relieving oneself" is used to mean "going to the toilet", which is not only used by the previous generation, but also used by many people now. This seemingly simple word actually has a profound historical and cultural origin. At present, the most popular version is that the text comes from the history of "inland immigrants" in Ming and Qing Dynasties.

One version is "Jieshou", which is the product of forced immigration during the Hongwu period in the early Ming Dynasty. At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, due to the turbulent situation at the end of the Yuan Dynasty and the constant wars in the south of the Yangtze River, many Jiangnan people took refuge in Shanxi. At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, Jiangnan, which was originally rich and lively, lacked labor and population, while Shanxi was excessively dense.

Therefore, after Zhu Yuanzhang succeeded to the throne, in order to resume production in the south and consolidate the Nanjing regime, the immigrants who stayed in Shanxi were forced to move to the south of the Yangtze River. Worried that these people refused to migrate because of the long distance, they sent officers and men to escort them back to Jiangnan. In order to prevent them from escaping halfway, they tied the hands of these immigrants with ropes. But someone always needs to excrete along the way, so they have to untie the rope in their hands. So there was the saying of "jieshou", which was finally handed down.

In addition, there is a similar version, which is related to the "immigration policy" in the early Qing Dynasty. It is said that in the early Qing Dynasty, after some wars and Zhang's brutal rule in Sichuan, after the Daxi regime was swept away in Shunzhi for four years, the people's livelihood in Sichuan Province was already very depressed and the population was greatly reduced. In order to resume production in Sichuan, the court ordered the forced relocation of Sichuan "immigrants" who fled to Huguang to Sichuan. The story after that is similar to the one above. However, at present, there is no way to verify these two statements, only folk statements are left, so many scholars have doubts about them.

In addition, some scholars have analyzed the origin and evolution of "Jieshou" from the perspective of linguistics. At present, there are about three views. One is that "jieshou" comes from "jieyu" and "hand" comes from the sound change in the process of language evolution. The second is that the ancients only used a word "knot" to mean "going to the toilet", but in the process of oral use, because of a pronunciation habit, it is necessary to add a word to make the pronunciation comfortable, so "knot" appeared.

Among them, "hand" has no clear meaning, just a syllable word. The third way of saying it is that the word "relieving oneself" has existed since ancient times, and its meaning is not only "going to the toilet", but also "liberation", "separation" and "separation". It appeared in poetry as early as the Tang and Song Dynasties. "Going to the toilet", as a kind of relaxation and relaxation of the body, is also used to euphemistically express this meaning. Later, in the process of historical evolution, other meanings, who is "relieving oneself", gradually disappeared, leaving only the meaning of "going to the toilet".