once-common words people don’t use anymore

Guy at work had an operation on his eye and said it had left him with a shiner - a word I don't recall hearing in a very long time.

― Eavis Has Left the Building (Tom D.)

you say "shiner" i'll say "bock"

I still use "welp" as campy shrug, like "anyhoo," but less irritating hopefully, although think the heyday of "welp" was maybe 2014, when I first went on Twitter, is that right?
Do people still say "hurl" meaning "puke"? I'm a hurlin' churl, sometimes.

moue

"in the early 90s there was a popular clothing brand called "Naf Naf" and I could not understand how it was fashionable at school to wear clothes that literally said "naff" on the front."

That reminded me of SMEG, the homeware manufacturer. I remember seeing a window display of some neat-looking kettles - they were ace - but the design was ruined by the SMEG logo. It's apparently an acronym for Smalterie Metallurgiche Emiliane Guastalla. I can't imagine storing mayonnaise in a fridge with SMEG on the front. Or pouring boiling water into a cup of mac and cheese if the kettle has a SMEG logo.

The thing is that I don't remember smeg, smeghead etc actually being a real insult when I was young, in the 1980s. Smeghead was invented for Red Dwarf, and I can remember seeing that show when it was brand new. I always had the impression it was supposed to mimic rudeness but in 1988 "smeg" was pretty odd (the substance is smegma), so it sounded less rude to the producers at the BBC than it sounded to the audience.

Does that make sense? e.g. one episode of Fawlty Towers begins with the hotel's sign re-arranged so that it says "flowery twats", which is obviously really rude nowadays, but in 1975 twat was pretty obscure. Not just the word but the actual thing. It very rarely appeared on television. You could still talk about "twatting someone about the head" in the 1980s without it sounding rude. Nowadays that would mean hitting someone on the head with a vagina, but in the 1980s it just meant hitting someone with a newspaper or a paper cup or something.

Git, that's another insult that doesn't get used a lot nowadays. There's a wealth of British slang from the 1970s and 1980s that has been largely forgotten today, partially because it was crap, partially because the internet tends to document US slang instead (e.g. "gag me with a spoon", "totally", "grody to the max") as if that was a universal constant, and partially because we're talking about subcultures of an objectively very small culture that no longer had a global reach outside a few small contexts. One of which was rock music, but the few British acts that played up their Britishness - most obviously Madness - didn't have much cultural clout outside the UK.

But perhaps there's a whole generation of people in Egypt and India who grew up with "Night Boat to Cairo" and "One Step Beyond". Who knows.

First of all you tell us "naff" is indelibly associated with Princess Anne and now "twat" was obscure in 1975. I think your imagination is getting the better of you.

Grody rules. No “to the max” reqd.

Pretty sure I first heard what'twat' meant at uni in 1989 or 1990. There were plenty of slang words for pudenda that I would've used as a teenager. Fanny, minge, radge, snatch, axe wound...anything but twat.

I've just remembered it's actually used in "Blazing Saddles"!

"Right foul git" was used in a Harry Potter movie

Sounds like an anagram.

Fanny, minge, radge, snatch, axe wound...anything but twat.

--Johnny Cash, "A Boy Named Twat"

lol

clunge

good story (which some probably know) abt the variable knownness of the word "twat" down the centuries (via etymonline of course)

The T-word occupies a special niche in literary history, however, thanks to a horrible mistake by Robert Browning, who included it in 'Pippa Passes' (1841) without knowing its true meaning. 'Then owls and bats,/Cowls and twats,/Monks and nuns,/In a cloister's moods.' Poor Robert! He had been misled into thinking the word meant 'hat' by its appearance in 'Vanity of Vanities,' a poem of 1660, containing the treacherous lines: 'They'd talk't of his having a Cardinalls Hat,/They'd send him as soon an Old Nuns Twat.' (There is a lesson here about not using words unless one is very sure of their meaning.) [Hugh Rawson, "Wicked Words," 1989]

I first heard it in the late 60s, when mum and dad -- then young adults -- were giggling with one another bcz one of them (almost certainly mum) had said it in my hearing, so they thought, and they had to explain what it meant (poorly explained iirc) and why it was bad for me to say. somehow unlike my mum and my sister i didn't swear much at all as a youngun so i guess the second element they achieved…

then at school as a teen i began hearing it again, used as a mocking insult one lad at another rather than the old nun sense above. curiously at school it was always said to rhyme with "hat" whereas mum and dad said it to rhyme with "squat"…

etymonline also has a strong story abt git, from 1706 in scotland, where one gregor burgess "protested against the said Allane that called him a witch gyt or bratt"

i'd like to know if browning ever realised his error tho

My dad also says it to rhyme with squat. I, like many other people I think, thought of it as akin to twit and didn’t learn THE TRUE MEANING till I went to university, I think.

It wasn’t actually on the syllabus.

browning is out of fashion academically

my parents mistook this word to mean “butt”, and therefore used it fairly liberally until i guess they found out because i haven’t heard it from them in years

i'd like to know if browning ever realised his error tho

According to Bill Bryson d Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him. (citation needed)
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/735078-the-poet-robert-browning-caused-considerable-consternation-by-including-the

I skipped the second “it” on first reading of your post, Tracer, and thought: wow, embarrassment has never hit me quite that hard.

lol

*giggle*

now enjoying my very made-up picture of the victorian literary world, with the victorian ashley pomeroys saying "lol lol lol browning but tbf it is a very obscure old word" and the victorian tom ds telling them that actually everyone knows it perfectly well (except apparently browning)

Am now deep into oblivious Victorian uses of twat

https://i.imgur.com/4GS9JzE.jpg

Exploration of Twat

https://i.imgur.com/UhaAXVW.jpg

Gerhard Rolfs: spent over a month in the Twat

What a story though

One to tell the kids..

...In the Twat, as a Mussulman
Don't stop till you get enough

Wikipedia also mentions a "traveling-wave amplifier tube". Which leads me to this page, which has a good example of comedy that uses negative space as a punchline:
https://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/Traveling_wave_tube.html

"A TWT has sometimes been referred to as a traveling wave amplifier tube (TWAT), although this term has fallen out of use."

My own mother called me a 'twerp' yesterday and I thought of this thread. And then I thought of Kurt Vonnegut:

INTERVIEWER

What is a twerp in the strictest sense, in the original sense?

VONNEGUT

It’s a person who inserts a set of false teeth between the cheeks of his ass.

Thanks, mum.

I was wondering earlier what word could best be substituted for twat. Twerp, while obviously milder to most non-Browning ears, is probably it.

ooh i don't agree with that at all, they're *very* different, twerp has much less vehement hostility and is also (if used affectionately) less affectionate

i ilx-searched twerp to see if anyone uses it except me (ans = yes) or as often as me (ans = daver popshots uses it a lot also)

Divided by a common insult.

when I was a kid in the 80's someone reprimanded me for using "twat" told me it meant I was calling them a pregnant fish

I think once you reach a certain age it’s harder to be a twerp. Elon Musk can still be a twerp and a twat. Kelvin MacKenzie is just a twat.

I was told a prat was a pregnant fish.

Twerp definitely much gentler* than twat, and essentially floats free of any meaning beyond 'a bit of a wally' (see also 'numpty').

*certainly when deployed by my mum.

tubular (Also, do you live in a country other than France that uses a comma as a decimal point? Do you know how this difference came to be?)

Does anyone say full stop anymore or was that just from the age of telegrams?

I used "full stop" at the end of an article last week!

https://www.stereogum.com/2191562/baroness-yellow-and-green-turns-10/reviews/the-anniversary/

Always assumed”twunt” was an ilx portmaneau, but now words don’t “mean” anything

i think twunt might come from b3ta or possibly before that. it's not from ilx though, just general UK internet

full stop is just British for period so yes it's used all the time

maiden/maid (the latter for anything other than a housecleaner, and even for that becoming less common).

You still hear maiden all the time if you're a cricket fan!

don't forget about twit

twit was roughly equivalent to dipshit afaik

There were plenty of slang words for pudenda that I would've used as a teenager. Fanny, minge, radge, snatch, axe wound...anything but twat.

^^^ revived by the first Avengers movie in 2012!

https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?date=all&q=facepalm