The most surprisingly contentious subject? Toilet roll orientation | Arwa Mahdawi

Under or over is clearly utterly unimportant, yet the choice has inspired an extensive Wikipedia entry, viral videos and record-breaking outcries

Behold the very small, very insignificant hill that I am willing to die on: toilet paper should always hang over the top of the roll rather than under it. Whenever I come across a toilet roll that does not conform to this orientation I feel strangely irritated and get an almost overwhelming urge to fix the damn thing.

I do not feel like a complete loo-ser admitting to this pet peeve in public because, guess what? There's a decent chance you have strong feelings about toilet paper too. It's a surprisingly fraught issue: there's even a dedicated Wikipedia entry on toilet paper orientation" that is more than 2,000 words long and contains 66 footnotes. When the writer of the popular Ann Landers" advice column was asked her opinion on the subject in 1986, she replied under" - an assertion so controversial that it generated a record-breaking 15,000 letters in response, along with several follow-up columns. Would you believe I got more letters on the toilet paper issue than on the Persian Gulf war?" Landers (a pen name) complained in a 1992 column.