Ever since I moved to Portland I've seen portable toilets on construction sites, at outdoor public events, the usual places, with the brand name Honey Bucket on the side. For some reason this always vaguely disturbs me. Honey bucket? I looked it up, and the Honey Bucket portable sanitation company website gives no history of its unusual name. But I googled it and found a few references to old horse-drawn carriages called honey buckets, charged with collecting human waste to be used as fertilizer. Other sources say it's actually the name of the bucket used to hold horse manure picked up during parades and such. So clearly there's a legacy of association with mammalian excrement. But why "honey bucket"? And why does that make me shudder?

The strange thing is, that phrase would cause a certain amount of disquiet in my innards even if it didn't have to do with you know what. Some words and combinations of words just give me the creeps. It's something about the way they sound, the sorts of abstract images they conjure.