man, they really had it hard back then without urbandictiona

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man, they really had it hard back then without urbandictionary!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pippa_Passes#.22A_distressing_blunder.22

Besides the oft-quoted line "God's in his Heaven/All's right with the world!" above, the poem contains an error rooted in Robert Browning's unfamiliarity with vulgar slang. Right at the end of the poem, in her closing song, Pippa calls out the following:

But at night, brother Howlet, far 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!

"Twat" both then and now is vulgar slang for a woman's external genitals. It has become a relatively mild epithet in parts of the UK, but vulgar elsewhere. When the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary enquired decades later where Browning had picked up the word, he directed them to a rhyme from 1660 that went thus: "They talk't of his having a Cardinall's Hat/They'd send him as soon an Old Nun's Twat." Browning apparently missed the vulgar joke and took "twat" to mean part of a nun's habit, pairing it in his poem with a priest's cowl.[2][3]