David Cameron innocently said twat on the wireless last week. He pronounced it to rhyme with hat, when it should rhyme with what. He hadn’t realised it was rude. It’s funny which words one can say and which one can’t. Mr Cameron seems to have thought twat was like prat, which seems to be acceptable. Oddly enough, an American dialect meaning for twat is ‘the bottom’, which is the modern meaning of prat. Similarly, the Americans also mean ‘bottom’ by the word fanny, a synonym in England for twat, which can lead to transatlantic misunderstandings. Prat used to mean a buttock, just the one. In Richard Brome’s play A Jovial Crew (1652), Autumn-Mort, an old beggar woman, cries out, ‘Set me down here on both my Prats,’ before singing a song, drinking her bowl of liquor, falling back and being carried off stage. Very droll.
Prat has hardly been offensive in modern times. Nöel Coward happily used the compound pratfall in Words and Music, which was staged in 1939, and contained the wise advice: ‘Don’t do a pratfall in your first routine.’ It is possible rudely to call someone a prat, but not a bottom. In 1792 James Gillray drew a caricature of the slender Pitt the Younger entitled The Bottomless Pitt, and another word available at the same period was bum, which Samuel Johnson defined in 1755 as: ‘The buttocks, the part on which we sit’. Puck, when not amusing himself as a crab-apple, imitated a stool and slipped from beneath the ‘bum’ of an old woman. My sympathies are with the old woman, naturally. But if bum has fallen out of straight vocabulary, it still doesn’t work as a term of abuse.
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