Daily Mail ad on Daily mail site - "Put down that phone, you p**t!" - referring to someone tweeting during Benn's funeral, but of interest for its asterisks. The full article gives 'prat', unredacted; but why would one ever bowdlerise the word, which isn't even from an obscene root - or am I the naive one, with pratting being featured in the aristocrats joke?
Checks:
prat
Line breaks:
prat
noun
• informal
1British An incompetent or stupid person; an idiot.
Origin
mid 16th century (in sense 2): of unknown origin.
sense 1 dates from the 1960s.
I never knew that.
Yes, well, but we don't say b*tt*cks, or even b*m. Yet?
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