Oh yes. I knew it was insulting but it was always treated as a mild insult; I didn’t find out what it meant until years later. Possibly not until the Prime Minister of the day said it on national radio…
It’s part of a nun’s attire, right?
At which point I discover that my mental pronunciation of the word – which wasn’t generally part of spoken slang where I lived – is incorrect. I didn’t know that it rhymes with “hat”; I thought it was closer to rhyming with “taught”.
Americans generally pronounce it like someone saying “trot” with a lisp.
It does rhyme with taught. Browning was mistaken about the pronunciation as well as the meaning.
The poem he apparently took it from also rhymed it with hat. Maybe the pronunciation has changed over the years.
A lisp?
In the UK ‘twat’ is pronounced to rhyme with rat. Wikipedia says that the US version, twot, is an older pronunciation.
Note that in the UK ‘twatting’ someone means hitting them hard enough to cause harm.
Ah, yes, the OED agrees that the UK and US pronunciations differ. For the US pronunciation it gives only the one that rhymes with “cot”, but for the UK pronunciation it gives both that one and the one that rhymes with “cat”, with the latter more common.
I’m from the UK. I always thought that “twot” was a minced oath.
I’m from the US, and never heard anyone pronounce twat to rhyme with cat. If I did, I’d probably think I misunderstood them.
One I learned just today: “Villain” originally meant “someone who resided in a village” and gradually assumed pejorative connotations from the landed aristocracy via classist underpinnings.
Reading the article about Villeins in Wikipedia, I found out that they sometimes had to pay a special tax or insurance that ensured that they were not beaten as a punishment (or possibly beaten less often).
This was called ‘Filstingpound’. One wonders how this insurance policy worked in practice.
Yesterday I swore by saying ‘Jesus’ and my 4 year old told me I shouldn’t say that! She just started school and it’s CoE affiliated. I didn’t realise they took religion so seriously, and I’m not sure I’m happy about it.
Heh, I was given detention by an idiot art teacher for exclaiming “Jesus” in public school when I was young. I didn’t bother attending that detention.
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