Well into his maturity, the
great English poet Robert Browning (1812-1889), for all his erudition, was
unacquainted with vulgar slang. Under the impression that a "twat" was a nun’s
headgear, he misused the word in a spectacularly naive fashion in his verse
play Pippa Passes (best known
for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the
world"):
Then,
owls and bats,
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!
When asked why, later in
his life, he quoted a passage from an old poem he’d found —‘They’d talked of
his having a cardinal’s hat, / They’d send him as soon an old nun’s twat.’
Oddly, there's a town in
Kentucky named Pippa Passes, after the poem.
