'Tart' Rejoinder

I see from my site statistics that someone found The Dawn Patrol today by asking a search engine why "loose women" used to be called "tarts."

Since the Dawn Patrol's unwritten slogan is, "We Play Your Requests," I did some searching on my own and found an enlightening page from the Australian National Dictionary Centre, "Good tart, bad tart, a page that explains how a word that once meant "girlfriend" came to refer to a woman of low repute.

"Interestingly, the two meanings had coexisted for the best part of a century," the author notes. "The good tart was last seen in the OED in 1980, while the tart as girlfriend makes her final appearance in the AND in 1977."

If all this talk about different meanings of "tart" sounds confusing, it's not half so confusing as this tasty morsel, nor this bizarre bite.
5:50 PM