I once used the word twat around my then-girlfriend and she “corrected” me, insisting it was pronounced “twah”. Turns out she thought people saying it were trying to use the French word toit and mispronouncing it. No idea why she thought anybody would want to call somebody else a French roof.
I mean, this is true if “used to be” means “prior to WWII” (or maybe even earlier). Publishers have been putting out collections of comic strips in book form for a very long time - I grew up in the '70s reading Pogo compendiums published in the 1960s.