The word "slattern" is correct and usable in written English.
It is an old-fashioned term used to describe a woman who is untidy, wears inappropriate clothing, and often behaves in a suggestive or immoral manner. For example: "The slattern stood out among the ladies at the party, wearing her low-cut dress and smoking cigarettes."
It is annoying that you are sometimes given a choice between being considered a slattern (no make-up, sensible shoes) or a bimbo (polished nails, nice hair).
Even at primary school, her first decisive act was to bring home for tea a wide-eyed slattern called Sandra, who ate nothing but chips and, shortly after her departure, was discovered to have lit a small fire in the back garden.
Theroux's first novel to appear in twenty years concerns the reclusive Eugene Eyestones, a sex columnist for the magazine Quink, who becomes entangled with his corpulent, eructating boss's equally repulsive ex-wife — the titular Laura Warholic, née Shqumb, a "homely, long-shanked, bony, spindle-nosed slattern of crucial need, low hopes, impoverished account, and undisguised but pathetic greed".
From the index of my well-thumbed copy: slut slattern 62.7 bitch 413.26 female animal 420.10 strumpet 987.14 The last of these sounds promising.
Lester's bully's widow is a money-grubbing slattern (played with admittedly hilarious gusto by Kate Walsh, who grabs the role with greasy palms); his sister-in-law is a bimbo who complains, "You don't cheat on Miss Hubbard County"; and Malvo's Barbie-like fiancée offers him her thumb up his butt as kinky payment for her diamond ring.
At times, he treats her like a slattern whom he can conquer through brute force; at others, he collapses in her lap like a baby.
Lily is a near-slattern looking to find her pride.
Things were just as feverish inside too, as Sugar – the whore hero of Michael Faber's bestselling Victorian pastiche – threaded her way past piglets and obese slatterns and pissing doxies to discover a friend dying, savagely beaten by her latest clients.
William Carlos Williams's "To Elsie" begins: The pure products of Americago crazy — mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves old names and promiscuity between devil-may-care men... and young slatterns, bathed in filth from Monday to Saturday.
As fans of Ms. Handler know, she doesn't discriminate; everyone is fair game: Asians, blacks, slatterns.
Wives instead must enter taverns, mimic slatterns, carouse, booze, shriek, stagger home, skirts in pleats.
