n candy store. Derived from the word “shop,” which means “store.” And also the word “tuck.”

1 n female genitalia. Not to be used in overly-polite company. The word, I mean. 2 v thump; hit: I don’t remember anything after the boom swung around and I got twatted. 3 n idiot. Generally directed at blokes. A suitably confusing example would read “some twat in the pub accused me of having been near his bird’s twat, so I twatted him.” On the female genitalia front, so to speak, the poet Robert Browning once read a rather vulgar protestant polemic which referred to an “old nun’s twat,” and subsequently mentioned a nun’s “cowl and twat” in one of his poems, under the mistaken impression that it was a part of her clothing.

adj kitsch. Old ladies’ front rooms, tartan cloth jackets and pleasant little sleepy retirement towns are twee. Marilyn Manson, drive-by-shootings and herpes are not.

v catch on; realise that something is up: Bob just poured the contents of the ashtray into Fred’s pint but he’s so pissed I doubt he’ll twig. It may come from the Gaelic word “tig,” meaning “understand.”

n twerp; nitwit. Made famous by Roald Dahl’s book The Twits, about a rather obnoxious couple of them.

n a house with two rooms upstairs and two downstairs. A one-up, one-down is an even smaller house.

n idiot. There seem to be more ways of politely describing your friends as mentally deficient in British English than anything else.

n rascal; tearaway. Normally used to describe children who are doing something a bit mischievous but not particularly awful. You’d be much more likely to hear “Quit spraying me with the hose, you wee tyke!” than you would “Run, the little tyke’s got a bomb!”

n tire. The black rubber things around the wheels of your car. The British spelling in this particular instance is, well, curious.