It is funny how, once you have thought about a word (unusual to you) it suddenly seems ubiquitous.
So, having written that I hadn’t known about the ‘indecent’ meaning of twat, I dropped in at the lending library for something easy to read, thinking maybe Ruth Rendell’s Portobello. No luck, but I picked up a book by a crime writer new to me, Sheila Quigley to find this:
With an exaggerated sigh Peggy screwed her face up. “Aye, mebbe, but that was before that horrible twat Mark Cummings dropped me for that pole dancer, down Newcastle quayside, remember?”
Before l’affaire Cameron I would have missed that
Then benzedrine – a word it seems I had barely thought of since the 1950s; indeed that evening I suddenly thought: Are you sure that’s the right word? Isn’t it that highly pungent dry cleaning fluid?
So. Lo & behold.
Joan Bakewell, challenged by Kirsty Young about what she meant by “not much” drug taking in 1950s Cambridge, said Oh, just benzedrine to keep you going all night to write an essay
And then Muriel Spark’s biography on Book of the Week told us how her health had been blighted in the years after the break up of her marriage by an over use of Benzedrine – “these days called speed”
