One time I used the word "twat" around my girlfriend and she said "you're pronouncing that wrong - it's pronounced twah." WTF? Turns out she thought when people used the word twat they were actually trying to use the French word toit. Why she thought people were trying to call other people roofs, I have no idea.
Blow her mind again by teaching her that despite the word existing and having the same meaning in both the US and the UK, in the former it rhymes with cot, but in the latter, cat.
Interesting. I know of at least one crude joke that relies on the pronunciation rhyming with cot - I read it in text form and was unable to make any sense of it.
Unrelatedly, I've been watching a lot of Steamed Hams videos lately, so now I'm thinking things like "Not in Utica, no. It's an Albany expression".
Clearly there must be some places that use the cot pronunciation. Maybe even a few over here in the UK. Similarly though, I'm not aware of any.
Or maybe it fell out of use in the US and the UK pronunciation has gained traction over there among a younger generation. Wouldn't be the first time that happened, one way or the other across the Atlantic.
Part of the problem might also be that not everywhere pronounces cot the same. See the cot-caught merger. I'm from a part of the US where cot and caught are still pronounced differently and I pronounce twat like cot, both with a short a sound.
I don't think the cot/caught merger would be a problem, though I suppose it's not impossible that in places in the US with the merger, the word in question always rhymes with cat.
The word was never commonly used when I was growing up, but I remember thinking it rhymed with cot - it threw me off when the Great Mighty Poo rhymed it with "scat".
Earths biosphere was originally anerobic,, the evolution of photosynthesis pretty much wiped out all life that existed at the time (though it was all bacteria at that point).
adjective
Living or occurring in the absence of free oxygen.
"anaerobic bacteria."
Of or relating to anaerobes.
Not requiring air or oxygen for life; -- applied especially to those microbes to which free oxygen is unnecessary; anaërobiotic; -- opposed to aërobic
I enjoy how "species who destroyed the planet and all living things" has become so normalized that it's just mentioned in passing before the actual punch line...
