Prat

An almost exclusively British word, prat has in the course of its long history undergone the common semantic shift from being a specific underground term to a general slang word. Its etymology is uncertain, but its earliest sense, in criminal slang, is “the buttocks,” shown in a virtually continuous history from Thomas Harman’s early underground glossary A Caveat for Commen Cursetors (1567) up to the present, in phrases like “I fell on my prat.” In his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) Francis Grose includes the term under the spelling pratts . In the United States a possibly related sense of “a hip-pocket” is recorded from about 1915, while Partridge claims that it carried the meaning of “the female pudend” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (This would give it a similar anatomical ambiguity to fanny .) A curious survival in American English is pratfall , meaning “a fall on the buttocks,” especially in comedy. It seems first to have been used in 1939 by Noel Coward in Parade . However, from the 1960s there started to emerge the general sense of “a fool, worthless person or ‘jerk,’” now widely current in British English. This shift is paralleled by arse and arsehole in British English and asshole in the American variety.