So a USian, a Canadian and a Brit were in the union bar one night… and for whatever reason the word “twat” comes up. Or rather, surfaces as [twot] in the US pronunciation. This is mischievously 'corrected’ by the Brit to the British pronunciation [twat]. Then something interesting happens. This Canadian pipes up with “Yeah, but [twot] is for genitalia. But if someone’s, yunno, being a “twat”, then it’s [twat]”. The US and the British speaker stare blankly ‘No it isn’t, mate’. This is fascinating. The form is used interchangeably as vulgar slang for vagina and as a slur in US and British English - analogous to “(being a) dick”, say - and displays a dialect dependent surface form variation. Canada has, for whatever reason (please get in touch if you know why) taken this vowel variation and used it to specify appropriate application of the word. Does this mean that /twat/ and /twot/ constitute two distinct but related lexemes in Canadian English? Or are [twat] and [twot] each a semantically context appropriate surface form of the same underlying representation /twat/? Is that a thing? I am intrigued.
