Swearing in English

I'm not the most diligent Harry Potter reader. I usually get caught up with each book just before the accompanying movie comes out. So with the Order of the Phoenix coming out soon, I decided it was time to get reading. But this post isn't about Harry Potter. It's about swearing. (yeah!)

I love how we share a language with the English, and yet we don't. I realize that this isn't particularly ground-breaking, everyone knows the English call an elevator a lift, but what really intrigues me is how different our two languages (dialects?) are when it comes to swearing. The English seem to have a much broader array of swear words and insults. They also seem to swear more, but maybe it's just the movies I watch. Anyway, the Harry Potter books are littered with English slang, and one word that keeps coming up is "prat". I love this word because it has such a solid, Anglo-Saxon bite to it. It's the type of word you can hear an English person muttering under his breath after the prat in question has left the room. I'm not sure what the American equivalent would be; probably something like "punk" or "tool". I was sharing my amusement over this word with Anne, and we got to wondering, what is the female equivalent of a prat? "Bitch" seemed a little too coarse, and the only other female insult I could think of was "slag", which is definitely not right. We were stumped, so if you have an idea, I'd love to hear it. Also, for the record, "git" appears to be stronger than prat, because it's only been used once so far, and it was in italics to emphasize the venom behind it. As yet, I have no data to say where "wanker" falls on that scale.