Son of a Bitch

In common with many insults, this has steadily lost impact over the centuries through indiscriminate use. Originally used only of despicable males, it is now highly generalized. Although this epithet is, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary , “more common in the U.S. than elsewhere,” it is recorded from as early as ca. 1330 in the variant form biche-sone in an angry context: “Abide ?ou ?ef malicious! Biche-sone ?ou drawest amis!” (“Stop you wicked thief! You son of a bitch, you draw wrongly!”) ( Of Arthour and of Merlin , l. 333). Thereafter it was used freely for some five centuries by a number of major British authors, invariably in provocative fashion, including Shakespeare: “son and heir of a mongrel bitch” (1605, in King Lear II ii 22); Laurence Sterne: “Phelps is a son of a Bitch for saying” (1762, in a private letter of April 8); and finally by Lord Byron in a typical line: “Like lap-dogs, the least civil sons of b?s” (1823, from Don Juan XI xli 123). As the entry for bitch shows, and as the censored forms show, that term was generally regarded as highly offensive by the late eighteenth century. This no doubt led to the decline of the compound in Britain and its omission from the OED .

One the earliest instances of American usage occurs in the diary of a Scottish traveler in New Jersey in 1744: “I was waked this morning before sunrise with a strange bawling and hollowing without doors. It was the landlord ordering his Negroes, with an imperious and exalted voice. In his orders the known term or epithet son-of- a-bitch was often repeated” (Mencken 1936, 313). Mencken noted that the term “rose to popularity in the United States during the decade before the Civil War, and at the start was considered extremely offensive” (1936, 313). But by the mid-twentieth century it was showing the familiar signs of weakening and generalization. Like bastard , it was being used in a familiar or even sympathetic fashion: “He was a drinking, whoring, kindly savage son of a bitch” (J. Carew, Wild Coast 1958, ix, 124). As far back as 1933 John Dos Passos wrote of “Every sonofabitchin yellerleg [cavalryman] in the State of Nevada” ( 42nd Parallel , I, 101), while in 1936, Henry Miller even referred to a woman as “a frigid son of a bitch” ( Black Spring , 250). Commenting that “All expletives tend to be similarly dephlogisticated by over-use,” Mencken continued:

Our maid-of-all work in that department [profanity] is son of a bitch , which seems as pale and ineffectual to a Slav or a Latin as fudge does to us … when uttered with a wink or a dig in the ribs, it is actually a term of endearment…. Worse, it is frequently toned down to s.o.b. or transmogrified into childish son of a gun .

(1936, 317)

The old force is not entirely lost, but usually needs reinforcement from some adjective like miserable or insufferable . A notable instance came from the plain-speaking President Harry S Truman, who said of General Douglas MacArthur: “I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was” (cited in Merle Miller’s aptly titled biography Plain Speaking 1974, 287). Because of its current range from offensive to trivial, some authorities like Spears (1990) list it as “provocative to some extent.” In Timothy Jay’s study of student speech, it ranked ninth out of twenty-eight items (1992, 143).

The epithet is now almost exclusive to American and Canadian English, having died out in British usage and being hardly ever encountered in other global varieties such as Australian, South African, and Indian English.