twat

   A character in Edward Blishen’s novel A Cack-Handed War addresses most of the men he works with as ‘y’bloody twat’, possibly thinking that it means no more than ‘you silly fool’. In the USA especially, there is far more awareness of the fact that ‘twat’ refers to the vulva, and is therefore equivalent to ‘cunt’.

   This seems to have been the original meaning in the seventeenth-century, when the word appeared in low forms of literature. That it is possible to misinterpret the word was most famously shown by Robert Browning, in his poetic drama Pippa Passes. Browning had apparently seen a reference to ‘an old nun’s twat’ in a seventeenth-century source. Not knowing the word, he took it to refer to part of a nun’s attire and used it accordingly, to be followed by writers as innocent as himself.

   The use of ‘twat’ by a husband to his wife in Cocksure, by Mordecai Richler, is decidedly not innocent. In Surfacing, by Margaret Atwood, a husband calls his wife ‘twatface’. This does not seem to be a standard expression, but Eric Partridge, in his Dictionary of Historical Slang, mentions that ‘cuntface’ is used to an ugly person.