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Prat has hardly been offensive in modern times. Nöel Coward happily used the compound pratfall in Words and Music, which was staged in 1939, and contained the wise advice: ‘Don’t do a pratfall in your first routine.’ It is possible rudely to call someone a prat, but not a bottom. In 1792 James Gillray drew a caricature of the slender Pitt the Younger entitled The Bottomless Pitt, and another word available at the same period was bum, which Samuel Johnson defined in 1755 as: ‘The buttocks, the part on which we sit’. Puck, when not amusing himself as a crab-apple, imitated a stool and slipped from beneath the ‘bum’ of an old woman. My sympathies are with the old woman, naturally. But if bum has fallen out of straight vocabulary, it still doesn’t work as a term of abuse. Bumsucker is all right, as used in a private letter by Swinburne, meaning ‘sycophant’, but to call someone a bum means ‘hobo’, in the American sense. That parody of a revivalist hymn ‘Hallelujah I’m a Bum’ dates from the 1890s.
Arse is ‘obsolete in polite use’, the OED kindly tells us, but, even so, few would call anyone an arse with any hope of offence. They might say arsehole, or asshole, the American version, which is somehow less rude. Last year the OED, anxious to update its arseology, inserted a quotation from The Royle Family (1999) to illustrate the term my arse: ‘Barbara. “Let’s all have a snowball! Don’t snowballs make your feel Christmassy, ey?” Jim. “Snowballs my arse. It’s a bloody swizz this Christmas lark.”’ So Mr Cameron’s radio host Christian O’Connell might suitably have responded: ‘Twat, my arse.’
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