once-common words people don’t use anymore

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

what happened to smdh. bring it back.

not come across a 429 error before. JUst got one there. So think I might need to start using an alternative to google.

lmao still hanging on but rofl is in really bad shape these days, sad to see. when was the last time someone even roflmaoed?

I miss pmsl which I thought had real potential but afaict it never spread much beyond UK teens on bebo and myspace

I am very glad the cutesy internet speak of late 00s / early 10s (interwebs etc) seems to be almost extinct though because that shit got unbearable for a while

I was struck by this article a couple of days in the newspaper about a feud between George Best and Bobby Charlton:
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/aug/10/the-feud-between-best-and-charlton-that-shattered-manchester-united

Quoth Bobby, "so many young people on the ‘scene’ have the attitude that nearly everything and ordinary people are ‘sick’. They behave as if the peak of senility is reached at the age of 25 and they must wring every drop out of life by then whether they offend other people or not.” (Bobby) goes on to attack those who insist on being “cool”, “gas” and “with it”."

It's interesting how "sick" has come full circle.

Did people use "vouchsafe"? Shakespeare loves it.

Reminds me of a Proust translation where the literal "He did not respond" became "He vouchsafed no answer" in English.

“beetling” to mean looming, jutting up etc most commonly used with eyebrows but have also read it in conjunction with hills, cliffs

Jordan Peterson seems to be the only person in the world who still says "up yours"

Not really the right thread but I couldn’t find a better one:

“Invincible” is pretty common word but in all my 43 years, despite being a big reader, I’ve never heard or seen the word “vincible” until today.