Citations:twerp

English citations of twerp

...Both Jonathan Green (in his dictionary of slang) and the Oxford English Dictionary cite a letter written on the 6th October 1944, by J R R Tolkien (the “Lord of the Rings” man) to his son Christopher (then serving the army). In that letter Tolkien reminisces about an earlier time when he hung around with one T. W. Earp (“the original ‘twerp’” he writes). This T. W. Earp was President of the Oxford Union just before the First World War, and it may have been during that war that this Oxford slang word “twerp” spread from the officers to the men and, thus, became more widely known. It’s recorded as soldiers’ slang in a book published in 1925.