Dear Cory:

Why is it that men so often spit while urinating? I see this (okay, saw this long ago) among schoolboys in the park, and it’s just as common with men at the urinals at the opera. Is there an evolutionary explanation?

Horkin’ in the Boys’ Room

Dear HITBR:

Sooner or later Cory was bound to be asked about body fluids; excitement and dread swirl in his mind.  You are an accurate observer, HITBR, as you allow your eyes to wander from the graffiti-covered white tiles ahead of you to the conduct and forms of adjacent urinators.  Spitting during urination, if not universal, is very common and not limited by class, if you will forgive such a freighted term.  Cory does not wish to shock the sensibilities of his female readers, but all sorts of things go on in men’s rooms, spitting being one of the least surprising.  Men’s rooms are one of the few remaining redoubts of exclusive maleness, now threatened by a clamour for unisex facilities with users of many-splendored genders. Without female supervision, men quickly run wild.  We are, after all, barely civilized and oddly proud of it.

Public and private spitting has been greatly reduced in our society.  Cory heartily recommends the entire contents of this little gem:  Hints on Common Politeness by D. C. Colesworthy, 1867, but here is an excerpt:

It is not polite to spit on the floor of a church, a dwelling-house, a car, in the cabin of a steamboat or a ferry-boat.  The spitting on the floor of our cars and ferry-boats has become so common that ladies have often found it difficult to obtain seats where they could prevent soiling their dresses.  A person who uses tobacco and is obliged to spit should never enter apartments set apart exclusively for ladies with gentlemen, unless he is willing to swallow the delectable juice.

With spittoons (cuspidors) relegated to antique shops and a decrease in the use of chewing tobacco, spit, tubercular or otherwise, is seldom seen on public surfaces in the west.  Cigarette butts and spent gum are the new spit.

In this rare instance when Cory put aside his lassitude,  got around to your fine question and exercised his big farmer fingers on his keyboard (despite popular belief, he comes from a long line of chambermaids  and farmhands) he discovered a world of fascination with your very question in the Land of Google.  No clear consensus emerges, and ingenious theories abound.  It seems plausible that taste, being so mediated by smell, is at the root of this.  Men’s rooms remain smelly environments despite the best efforts of the sanitary-industrial complex.  It seems possible that our immune systems detect the presence of aerosolized dangerous bacteria by smell, and want to clear them from our mouths by spitting.  Also, spit is alkaline, and by ejecting it rather than the usual swallowing – we swallow about 1.5 litres of saliva each day – we thereby increase the acidity of our stomach fluids, that acidity being another barrier to bacteria we take in through the nose and mouth.

Spitting into urinals could be provoked by the disgust factor.  Increased saliva production precedes vomiting and a low arousal of the vomit reflex could be triggered by a smelly public washroom.  The increased flow needs to be cleared.  None of the above, though, explains al fresco spitting where nasty aroma isn’t a factor.  Clearly, research is needed.  Men are not entirely scrupulous about where their body fluids end up: witness the population boom.  The paucity of sanctioned places to urinate adds to the random deposition.

Cory, ever curious in more ways than one, invites his legions of followers to submit their own observations and theories, as no certainty exists in this intriguing matter, and trusts his answer to your question has been sufficiently fulsome, HITBR.