Does the insult "twerp" and the slang "twirp" have anything to do with each other?
I don’t think so, but that’s what I thought when I first saw it!
Twerp apparently dates from around 1870. Wiktionary says: The Oxford English Dictionary writes that it may have been coined (perhaps by J. R. R. Tolkien) around 1910 from the name of T. W. Earp but also that the word was used to denote a type of racing pigeon that flew between Antwerp and London c. 1870, while TWIRP is an acronym (The Woman Is Requested to Pay) which sprung up in the late 1940s!