Bitch

Bitch has the longest history among animal terms as an insult, extending from the fourteenth century to the present, during which time it has steadily lost force through generalization. Although the etymology lies in late Old English bicche , a female dog, the word was not used demeaningly in the earliest period of the language, as the cognate Old Norse term bikkja was. (The same pattern applies to other animal terms of abuse in Anglo-Saxon.) The early applications were to a promiscuous or sensual woman, a metaphorical extension of the behavior of a bitch in heat. Herein lies the original point of the powerful insult son of a bitch , found as biche sone ca. 1330 in Arthur and Merlin (l. 333), while in a spirited exchange in the Chester Play (ca. 1400) a character demands: “Whom callest thou queine, skabde bitch?” (“Who are you calling a whore, you miserable bitch?”) (l. 181). However, in a contemporary reference in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale , during a denunciation of gambling, dice are referred to as “the bicched bones” (l. 656). Henry Brinklow, a savage polemicist of the Reformation, referred sarcastically to his Catholic opponents in 1542 as being “as chast as a sawt bitch,” or “as pure as a randy bitch” ( The Complaynt of Roderick Mors , xxiv, 63).

Male application is not exclusively modern, being recorded from about 1500. Perhaps the most arresting instance occurs in Thomas Hobbes’s translation of the Odyssey (1675): “Ulysses looking sourly answered: ‘You bitch’” (Book xviii, l. 310). However, the term could be used with considerable flexibility; in Tom Jones (1749), Fielding has the genial comment: “I can tell you landlord is a vast comical bitch.” (Book xvii, chapter 3). Although Farmer and Henley commented in their Slang and Its Analogues (1890–1904) that the opprobrious application to a man “has long since passed out of decent usage,” it has again became fashionable in recent decades.

During the eighteenth century the virulent female sense became dominant. Thus, Francis Grose noted in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) that “the most offensive appellation that can be given to an English woman, even more provoking than that of whore, as may be gathered from the regular Billingsgate or St. Giles’s answer—’I may be a whore, but can’t be a bitch.’” Dr. Johnson (1755) quoted a very modern idiom from Dr. John Arbuthnot’s History of John Bull (1712): The principal character has “an extravagant bitch of a wife” (chapter 9). The growth of the insulting sense drove the literal sense of bitch out of currency, resulting in various euphemistic formations, such as doggess, lady dog, she dog , and puppy’s mother . Mrs. Piozzi recounted Dr. Johnson’s anecdote: “I did not respect my mother, though I loved her; and one day, when in anger she called me a puppy, I asked her if she knew what they called a puppy’s mother” ( Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson , 1786).

Today the term can be used as a wounding personal insult in both British and American English, but is less prominent in Australian and other global varieties. The overall semantic trend in modern English has been generalization, since it can also be applied to a man, to a difficult situation or a complaint, and used as a verb meaning “to complain or criticize.” In American slang a “shift to opposite” is also apparent in that bitching and bitchin’ can be used to mean “very, wonderful or excellent,” a sense recorded from about 1957.