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Twat is a vulgar term for a woman’s privates.

In the annals of obloquy, when ranking crudity and rudeness, twat is not quite as offensive as the word cunt (which I will discuss next week).

Almost all legitimate dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary and the Unabridged Merriam-Webster, mark the rude slang word as “of obscure origin” or “origin unknown.” I don’t think so. My personal etymological proposal below is clear, cogent and concise.

The word twat is related to the Old Norse word thveit ‘a piece of land’ but literally in Old Norse ‘a piece cut off’ or more provocatively for our modern slang word, ‘a place cut up,’ a place of cutting,’ ‘a place cut off.’ The Old Norse verb thvita ‘to cut off’ had a relative in Old English thwitan ‘to cut off.’

By this explanation, a twat is a woman’s “cut,”a woman’s piece. Twat may hark back to an ancient chauvinist notion of the most ignorant anatomy in which primitive men, observing female genitals, thought the pudendum was the wound site of something cut off by nature, namely a penis! Similar thoughts abide in modern slang terms like gash.

And, although Freud’s ‘penis envy’ has been repudiated by most psychiatrists as an artifact of rather oinky Viennese provenance, we know from some vaginal words in other languages that this was a not uncommon notion in the minds of the ruling primitive men who made some of the world’s earliest words and thought some of the world’s earliest primitive thoughts.

We have existing evidence of Old Norse thveit becoming Scots twat in the Scottish place name discussed below.

 

A Piece of Land

Thveit meaning ‘a piece of land’ appears in quite a few British place names and subsequent surnames:

Applethwaite – an old term for orchard

Crossingthwaite – a piece of land where two roads met, then a surname based on the fact that the founding ancestor of the family had a farm at such a crossroads.

In the British counties of North Lancashire and Cumbria abound many such surnames: Dowthwaite, Ormthwaite and Seathwaite.

I once wrote a short story that featured a British family with an exceedingly tiny farm which they had nevertheless managed to pass down through several generations. Their ancestral surname was Pizzlethwaite. They possessed a field the size of a bull’s penis. A pizzle is, among other things, a whip made from a bull’s penis. In form pizzle is a dialectic diminutive of the root in piss and pisser.

 

Morphological Bits

For the twait/thwaite/twat alterations, consider that lost aspiration (losing the /h/ in /th/) is common across related languages and dialects. Look at cognates, words sprung from the same Indo-European root word, with initial Old Norse /t/ and Germanic /t/ or /d/ and English /th/

for example:

1. English thunder, German Donner, Norwegian torden (literally ‘Thor’s din’ that is ‘Thor’s noise’). Thor was the chief god of the Viking pantheon and thunder was the sound of the chief god bellowing his echoic anger across the heavens.

2. English thick, German dick, Norse tykk.

3. English thing, German Dinge, Norwegian ting

 

Twatt Bids You Welcome!

Twatt is a Scottish village a few miles north of Stromness in Orkney. Its name is Old Norse, brought to those northern isles by the Vikings. The root is thveite and Old English had either a cognate or, more likely, a derivative thwite, later thwaite which meant a piece of ground cleared of trees and ready to be pasture or a farmer’s field. A thwaite might also be cleared land upon which to build a house. 

Varia

Twat has other, related meanings. However the currently circulating urban word myth that twat originally meant ‘a pregnant goldfish’ has no etymological merit or ichthyological validity.

Twat is used to mean fool, as a synonym for twit.

Twash

Some English dialects have twash as an alternate form, meaning fool or female genitalia.

Twat Comet

From the rather torrid jargon of bizarre sex shows comes a phrase new to me: twat comet. This is apparently anything expelled from a vagina at high speed. It is said voles are placed within milady’s pudendum and then, by means of vaginal muscular contractions, the tiny field mice are shot with daunting velocity outward, to the general delight and applause of persons who pay to view such phenomena. I shall conclude today’s twatological excursus by stating clearly that Wanda & Her Amazing Voles is not an act that will replace the magician and his hat at my next summer fair.

 

Copyright © 2008 William Gordon Casselman

 

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