“In a striking example of the unfamiliarity of some Victorians with bawdy vocabulary, we see that the poet Robert Browning egregiously misunderstood one common word. He encountered the couplet “They talked of his having a Cardinal’s hat,/They’d send him as soon an old nun’s twat,” in a seventeenth-century poem. Erroneously believing from this passage that the word referred to a part of a nun’s habit, Browning wrote of “Cowls and twats” in his 1848 poem Pippa Passes.”