The French invented the use of the bidet (bee-day) and it was very crude in the beginning. It was just a bowl that you squat over and then evolved into a separate porcelain toilet with faucets, but you still had to squat or straddle it. In the middle 1900's American toilet manufacturers improved the bidet as a porcelain bathroom device, but the American culture did not adopt it and it was mostly exported to other countries. The bidet is actually a small horse. And you straddle a horse, so when the French used a device for cleaning the genitals and the posterior they called it a bidet, because you straddle it when you wash.