May 31
Pippa Passes →
“Twat” both then and now is vulgar slang for a woman’s external genitals.[1] It has become a relatively mild epithet in parts of the UK, but vulgar elsewhere. When the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary inquired decades later where Browning had picked up the word, he directed them to a rhyme from 1660 that went thus: “They talk’t of his having a Cardinall’s Hat/They’d send him as soon an Old Nun’s Twat.” Browning apparently missed the vulgar joke and took “twat” to mean part of a nun’s habit, pairing it in his poem with a priest’s cowl.[2][3]
Words are fun.
