just spooky to be here 🦇🧛👻🕸️ @gingermophobia.bsky.social · 04/10/2026me trying out Gen Z slang but being too embarrassed to double check 0130 0
![The play contains an error rooted in Robert Browning's unfamiliarity with vulgar slang. In her closing song, Pippa says:
But at night, brother howlet, over the woods,
Toll the world to thy chantry;
Sing to the bats' sleek sisterhoods
Full complines with gallantry:
Then, owls and bats,
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister's moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry![21]
— from Act IV: Night, Scene: Pippa's chamber again (emphasis added)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ap2eev7lky7la2cskdb2eeb5/bafkreialm4qjvfbuj6oogc3s52bbsnzv662ywvj7v44oviedtypvg4ejvy)
!["Twat" was and remains vulgar slang for a woman's external genitalia. But in 1886, Frederick James Furnivall, a contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary, asked the poet for his source, and Browning replied "that he got the word from the Royalist rhymes entitled 'Vanity of Vanities', on Sir Harry Vane's picture"[22] in which Vane is lampooned thus:
They talk't of his having a Cardinalls Hat,
They'd send him as soon an old Nun's Twat[23]
Browning added, "The word struck me as a distinctive part of a nun's attire that might fitly pair off with the cowl appropriated to a monk."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ap2eev7lky7la2cskdb2eeb5/bafkreig23haz4nxujb2zdizo6umf2shfojooexztf7benms7n2pxcfknxi)
