Karen Stollznow’s Aeon essay is knowledgeable and well written, but if it were only about the changing semantics of bitch, I probably wouldn’t have linked it, figuring it wouldn’t add much to the collective knowledge of the Hattery. But Stollznow is a linguist, and she has passages of less obvious material that warmed my heart:
In its most literal sense, a bitch is a female dog, and this is also the word’s earliest meaning. Because bitch feels so contemporary, so casually present in everyday speech, it’s easy to assume it’s a relatively recent addition to the language. The etymology, however, tells a different story. ‘Bitch’ meaning ‘female dog’ dates to around 1000 CE, giving the word a pedigree that stretches back more than 1,000 years. It is older than ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’, and older than many of the insults we now think of as timeless.
In those early centuries, the word didn’t quite look, or sound, the same. Bitch is an Old English word, inherited from Germanic, and during the Anglo-Saxon period it would have been unfamiliar to modern readers. Old English was the spoken and written language of the time, though literacy was limited, and bitch appeared as bicce, pronounced roughly as ‘bitch-eh’.
The earliest recorded use of bitch is from a medieval text known as the Medicina de Quadrupedibus – Medicines from Four-Footed Creatures: a compendium of traditional remedies made from animal parts. Originally written in Latin and translated into Old English in the 11th century, the manuscript contains two early examples of bitch used in its literal sense. […]
We also occasionally find the word spelled bicge in Old English, a reminder that its modern form was far from settled. (We can still spot the modern descendants of other contemporaneous spellings, such as frocga [frog] and stacga [stag].) Over the centuries, bitch underwent a series of shifts in both pronunciation and spelling. In surviving manuscripts, it appears in many guises, from bycce in early Middle English to becch, bichche, bych and bytche in later forms of the language. Scottish texts introduced further variations, including beiche and beitch.
These inconsistencies reflect the fact that English spelling had yet to be standardised. That began to change in the 15th century, when William Caxton introduced the printing press to England, helping to freeze spellings in place (at least in theory). By the 17th century, bitch had largely settled into its modern form, sometimes with an -e tacked on to the end. […]
By the late 18th century, bitch had become so improper that Captain Francis Grose, compiler of The Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), declared it ‘the most offensive appellation that can be given to an English woman – even more provoking than that of whore.’ For Samuel Johnson, the word was so distasteful he could only allude to it in an anecdote to his friend: ‘I did not respect my own 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.’ A common saying at the time ran: ‘I may be a whore, but can’t be a bitch,’ roughly equivalent to the modern retort: ‘I may be drunk, but you’re ugly.’ […]
Like its sister term, son of a bitch has a long history. Old Icelandic already had a close relative in the insult bikkju-sonr. In English, the earliest recorded form appears as bichesone (‘bitch’s son’) in the medieval romance Arthur and Merlin. Centuries later, the phrase was thriving in London’s underbelly, where it was picked up by none other than William Shakespeare. In King Lear, the Earl of Kent delivers a particularly barbed version, complete with the modern spelling, when he calls Oswald ‘a knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats … and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch.’
Over the centuries, use of the phrase waned but, just as son of a bitch was fading in England, it found new life in the United States. The expression appears in John Neal’s gritty Revolutionary War novel Seventy-Six (1823), and was later popularised by Lost Generation writers such as John Steinbeck, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. […]
If bitch could signal service at the tea table, it also came to convey swagger on the bandstand. In jazz circles in the 20th century, the label functioned as a genuine compliment. A musician who was truly ‘hot’, a master of their instrument, might be described as a bitch. Miles Davis used the word this way, both for himself and for players he admired, most famously in the title of his album Bitches Brew (1970).
The usage surfaces repeatedly in memoirs and music journalism. Writing about the jazz scene of the 1930s, the jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow recalled a gifted cornet player named Yellow: ‘That boy was really a bitch, even though he was never taught to play music. He had more music in him than Heinz has pickles.’ Decades later, Crescendo magazine struck the same note in an article on the jazz bassist George Duvivier: ‘That’s one of the greatest bassists of all time on there. Very underrated – but he is a bitch, believe me.’ In the language of jazz, bitch meant talented, gifted and effortlessly cool. […]
In 2005, The New York Times omitted the title of the book Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport in an article, prompting criticism for what one observer called the paper’s ‘astonishing squeamishness and misplaced political correctness’. The irony deepened when an op-ed about the book’s controversy appeared in the same issue, written by its author, the chess grandmaster Jennifer Shahade, and commissioned by the newspaper itself. But neither piece mentioned the word at all.
Much more at the link, including discussion of other insults; of course I particularly enjoyed the mockery of the Times (“astonishing squeamishness” is a good phrase).
George Duvivier! Just for kicks I spent a few minutes trying to google up some number he’d played on that had “bitch” in the title but w/o success. But I found a transcription of the 1966 group interview the quote comes from, which is not actually primarily about Duvivier. It’s the standard music-press thing of playing a bunch of different records for the interviewee(s) and getting their reactions. The recording including Duvivier that provoked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ridley (himself a bassist) to utter the words quoted was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RF_Q2zdBco
Thanks for doing the research — I had wondered about that but was too lazy to look it up.
In the interests of completeness, here’s the whole transcript. http://www.jazzprofessional.com/blindfold_tests/Horace%20Silver%20Quintet.htm
The other musician-interviewees, id’d in the transcript only by surname, are Horace Silver (piano), Tyrone Washington (tenor sax), and Roger Humphries (drums), each of whom has a wikipedia article about him. Tomkins is the interviewer although he mostly just stays silent and puts on the next record to elicit reactions about.
ETA: Oh, and the trumpeter Woody Shaw starts chiming in toward the end of the interview, thus making it the full quintet that did the “quintet” numbers on the half of Horace Silver’s _The Jody Grind_ LP that was recorded on Nov. 2, 1966 at Rudy Van Gelder’s place in Englewood Cliffs. (The other half of that album was recorded on 11/23 w/ James Spaulding expanding the lineup to a sextet.)
Man, that Bud Powell piece is amazing — not the kind of thing one associates with him. Apparently Francis Davis said “This piece has to be played Powell’s way or not at all, which explains why it’s so rarely performed.”
Betty (Mademoiselle) Mabry claims that she suggested to Miles to change it from Witches Brew; I am not certain whether that’s actually in variance with what’s written here.
Thus one of the great corporate interoffice memoranda of the 20th century, from the producer Teo Macero to some suits at Columbia Records. “Please advise.”
https://www.milesdavis.com/milesphotos/teo-macero-letter-about-miles-davis-bitches-brew-please-advise/
Bitch: A History, Bitches.
I’m surprised French biche “female deer” – a term of endearment when applied to humans – isn’t mentioned. Given the Old Icelandic, is it a loan from English?
Edit: bitch goes way back and is the one who bickers; biche “is an enigma”.
The mention of Horace Silver, superb bop/funk musician, brought back memories of that gentleman from Norwalk, CT, where I lived a long time ago. A fond memory is bumping into him at Sally’s Place, a jazz record shop in Westport. Another is quasi-socio linguistic. His father or his father’s family was from Cabo Verde. In Portuguese speaking countries Silva is among the most common names. An Anglicized version is Silver.
Horace Silver composed a few jazz standards. One of the best known is Song for my Father.
Listen to that, https://youtu.be/mKf1x3CALAE?si=fQ3tQzigAgtGrSaJ
and then to Steely Dan’s Rikki Don’t Lose That Number
https://youtu.be/UfZWp-hGCdA?si=DpeTjPh7qFrZyLfo
You decide if the resemblance is inspiration or plagiarism.
The Spanish bicho’s primary meanings include bug and any small animal ‘de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme’. The RAE dictionary offers this:
bicho
Del dialect. bicho, y este del lat. vulg. bestius ‘animal1’.
m. coloq. Animal pequeño, especialmente un insecto.
Sin.:
insecto, sabandija, musaraña, gusarapa.
m. despect. animal (‖ ser orgánico).
Sin.:
animal1, bestia, alimaña, fiera.
m. despect. Persona aviesa, de malas intenciones.
Sin.:
malvado, canalla, alimaña, sabandija.
m. despect. persona (‖ individuo).
What does she mean, “older than ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt'”?
@drasvi: The OED says each of those is “probably a word inherited from Germanic,” but they are not definitely attested before the sixteenth and thirteenth centuries, respectively.
You decide if the resemblance is inspiration or plagiarism.
The tunes are nothing alike, nor the chords/changes. (Fagen is as usual quite a bit more sophisticated.) The intro riff is a pretty standard bossa-nova rhythm/common repertoire. wikip points out the similarity. I’d suspect Silver/the bassist was ‘inspired’ by something before them.
(wikip says the Steely Dan intro is played on a ‘flapabamba’ percussion instrument.)
Informed commentary from an akshull musician as to musical alleged plagiarism. (That was the ‘Blurred Lines’/Marvin Gaye ‘Got to Give it Up’ case. You can also find on Youtube Adam Neely talking about the Ed Sheeran/Marvin Gaye case, similarly unimpressed. In these cases, an ‘audience’ of twelve good men and true are not reliable judges. Musicians/particularly in pop genres ‘borrow’ relentlessly.)
R.L. Stevenson, in his unfinished ‘Weir of Hermiston’, has the 18th century ‘hanging judge’ Weir view the body of his gentle, sentimental wife and reflect that they were ill-suited to one another.
And then, with a most unusual gentleness of tone, “Puir bitch,” said he, “puir bitch!”
Yes, but it needs the next few words: “, and I’ll be sober in the morning.”
Maybe, but it complicates the explanation of why the English for Comte is Earl, though we have Countess, Viscount, County. What I have read is that at the time of the Norman Conquest, the English pronunciations of Comte and cunt were identical, and the Norman counts didn’t like that confusion and preferred to retain the English word.
There are plenty of slurs aimed at men, from ‘bastard’ to ‘asshole’, but there is no true male equivalent of bitch.—I agree bastard is not “equivalent” to bitch in force or semantic nuance, but I would have said it was the canonical male counterpart in some contexts, e.g.
– as a standalone to-your-face insult (e.g. Moonlighting S3E14)
– as a light-entertainment stock character
Alliteration helps. Perhaps cf. witch–warlock?
Has there ever been a time when “bitch” was as taboo a word as those other two venerable monosyllables mentioned in the block quote? That it has a “respectable” literal meaning for a literal female dog complicates simple corpus-searching, but it’s easy enough to find the relevant unambiguously pejorative sense of bitch for a female human printed w/o bowdlerization in e.g. novels from the 1920’s or 1930’s whose publishers would not have dared to typeset either of those other two.
Although now I am recalling an impressive euphemizing from the 1984 election cycle here in the U.S.: “I can’t say it, but it rhymes with rich.” Thus Barbara Pierce Bush (1925-2018), referring to her husband’s opponent Geraldine Ferraro (1935-2011).
Consistent with one of the less-taboo historical uses noted in the piece hat linked in the OP, here’s an entry from a lexicon of “Colloquial or Cant Terms peculiar to the University of Cambridge in 1824”: “To bitch – A Bitching Party. The phrase is very common at Cambridge. A young man who performs with great dexterity the honours of the tea table, is, if complimented at all ! said to be an excellent Bitch. (N.B. – This term appears to have been used by undergraduates _and_ fellows).”
The “performs with great dexterity” gloss makes one wonder if this is an ancestor of the jazzman sense?
I’ve been listening to Stollznow’s “Monster Talk” podcast for years; I had no idea she was a linguist. The podcast is a fun, but well researched, exploration of monsters, ghosts, and things that go bump in the night in urban legend, myth, and popular culture.
Stollznow’s phrasing “Bitch could even swing in the opposite direction, becoming a bitchin’ word used to describe something good, impressive or cool” refers to without explanation the sense of “bitching” glossed by wiktionary as “Excellent, outstanding.”* Wiktionary’s earliest example sentence for that one is from 1982, from the mouth of Moon Unit Zappa (“Encino is, like, so bitchin’.”), who is indeed the Voice of My Generation. I certainly did not know the word in that sense earlier than that.** But is there a standard account in the literature of exactly how and when that originally-novel sense emerged?
*I would add “awesome,” which is a synonym in (with the right intonation) the same register.
**I’m not sure it ever became standard in the idiolects of the particular Gen X’ers I grew up with and hung out with. The use in e.g. the title of the 1985 underground quasi-hit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitchin%27_Camaro, for example, still seemed novel and marked to my ear, although not incomprehensible.
is there a standard account in the literature of exactly how and when that originally-novel sense emerged?
I would have thought “doer of woman’s work” > “server of tea” > “excellent server of tea” > “excellent musician” > “excel at music” > “excel”
…although perhaps an instance where foo (n) > fooing (adj) skips the intermediate foo (v) stage
The use in e.g. the title of the 1985 underground quasi-hit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitchin%27_Camaro, for example, still seemed novel and marked to my ear, although not incomprehensible.
That is, for me, the locus classicus of the term.
the sense of “bitching” glossed by wiktionary as “Excellent, outstanding.”* Wiktionary’s earliest example sentence for that one is from 1982, from the mouth of Moon Unit Zappa
I first heard it from Moon Zappa, but Partridge et al. and Green cite it to Gidget, by Frederick Kohner (1957).
I think we’re missing that both ‘bitch’ and ‘son of a bitch’ can be expressions of awe. I think it’s an extension from “breaking norms of decency” to “transgressing human boundaries”, i.e. “doing the impossible” or “being impossibly good”. Similarly Norw. (but much wider) Han er en jævel til å spille piano “(lit.) He’s a devil playing the piano”.
Hence of course “I moved on her like a bitch.”
A difference between ‘bitch’ and ‘son of a bitch’ as a compliment might be that a bitch has the power to allure or ingratiate him-/herself, or just connect emotionally, hence the musical sense, while ‘son of a bitch’ is more or less plain audacity.
“being impossibly good”. Similarly Norw. (but much wider) Han er en jævel til å spille piano “(lit.) He’s a devil playing the piano”.
and somewhere inbetween is “monster”, as in “she’s a monster on alto, but her clarinet work’s not so great”.
Even less polite terms can be repurposed for praise.
When the extremely scary Snoop is buying a nailgun in The Wire, she says she is tipping the understandably nervous young white salesman because he’s been “working like a motherfucker.”
In Tade Thompson’s excellent Rosewater trilogy, there is a character called Motherfucking Danladi. One gathers that his epithet reflects his extreme badassery, and is given in (somewhat appalled) respect, rather than disapprobation.
“There ain’t half been some clever bastards.”
https://youtube.com/watch?v=0jeD4nFIlzk
@mollymooly: although the loc. class. bitchin’ examples I gave (the neighborhood Encino and a Chevrolet Camaro) are not humans, and it seems odd to my ear to use that sense of bitchin’ to apply to a human being, however well they may play the bass or excel in some other field of endeavor.
BTW, I just saw a reference (in an entirely unrelated context) to the Jim Carroll Band song “People Who Died,” which has a line with either the phrase “some bitchin’ proof” or the phrase “sufficient proof,” depending on which online transcription you want to trust. Presumably one is the actual wording and the other a mondegreen but I’m not prepared to wager on which is which.
ETA: In the interests of lexicographic inquiry, I did manage to find on one of my shelves a hard copy of the _Catholic Boy_ album containing that track, but my copy, at least, lacks a lyric sheet. But if anyone has questioning regarding lyrics from the follow-up _Dry Dreams_ album from ’82, it turns out I’ve got those.
When Audrey II sings “I’m a mean green mother from outer space”, I feel that he/she/it is not claiming to be a female parent, however mean or green.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-8-lx6sSgmo
When the extremely scary Snoop is buying a nailgun in The Wire
It’s been a while now since I saw the show, but that brought the scene vividly to mind. One does not forget Snoop. Wikipedia: “Author Stephen King called her ‘perhaps the most terrifying female villain to ever appear in a television series’.”
Mary Morris as Number Two in “Dance of the Dead” (which, based on internal evidence, has to be the second episode of The Prisoner chronologically) is pretty scary, albeit in quite a different way.
Accurate.
Something tells me if it was n1gger, k1ke, r3tard, or f4ggot, people would never be so cavalier. But slurs against women—well now they’re just fun and interesting, aren’t they? Because of course no slurs exist for the hatred of women or anything. They’re not so normalized that it’s mocked if someone dislikes their use and popularity.
I’m not sure what you mean by “cavalier,” and I assure you people have studied the history and usage of all the words you mention. I would also call to your attention that the linked article is by a woman.
a few more “bitch”/”sonovabitch” usage notes:
rihanna’s Bitch Better Have My Money – and the video for it especially – casts her thieving accountant as the “bitch”, and is precisely about his inability to talk his way out of her plan for bloody revenge. applying the term to men is, in part, just misogyny, but i think it has a strong implication of charmlessness (as shown here) in a way that contrasts with its application to women, though it retains the untrustworthiness that seems to me to be at the core of the insult.
and while i hesitate to read too much into anything glenn danzig has sung, Where Eagles Dare presents what’s denied in its chorus (“i ain’t no goddamn son of a bitch”) as cowardice, ineffectuality, and weakness, rather than misplaced audacity.
I should note that I specifically meant the use as a positive exclamation or description. “You bitch!” “You son of a bitch!” We can easily extend that to “You bastard!”, “You monster!”, “You devil!”. I don’t know if any of the slurs from SW’s list can be used like that.
Is there an element of solidarity or pride here? “They call us X, but you have the audacity to own it. Respect!”
I listen to a podcast by a couple who train ultramarathon runners, she is MD/Phd and he is an engineer and a lawyer. They use ‘bitch’ in a way I don’t understand, more complimentary than otherwise, but with acidulous overtones as well.
So I did some other reading on usages and found,
According to Stephane Dunn, in “Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films,” the term “Baad Bitches” began with the sexploitation of Black female actors in the 1970s, as well as being products of contemporary dominant culture (2008). Scallen highlights Dunn’s (2010) work by referencing the following:
The “Bad Bitch” suggests a black woman from working-class roots who goes beyond the boundaries of gender in a patriarchal domain and plays the game successfully as the boys by being in charge of her own sexual representation and manipulating it for celebrity and material gain” (2010, p. 27).
https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/now-thats-a-bad-bitch-the-state-of-women-in-hip-hop
Then there’s the song “Honey,” in which Swift sings about how, until she started dating her partner, she had negative associations with pet names. In one instance, she recounts an incident in which “the b*tch was tellin’ me to back off / ‘Cause her man had looked at me wrong.”
Paige says she was struck by Swift casually calling a female stranger a “b*tch” throughout the track, given the musician’s thorny history with the word. The singer’s well-publicized feud with Kanye West largely stemmed from him writing the lyric “I made that b*tch famous” about her on his 2016 song “Famous.” Although Swift didn’t consent to West using the lyric, his then-wife Kim Kardashian posted an edited clip in which Swift seemingly agreed to it, sparking a massive backlash against Swift that partially inspired her to make Reputation.
In contrast to her casually misogynistic lyrics on “Honey,” Bonnie points to a scene in Miss Americana in which Swift talks about working to “deprogram the misogyny in my own brain.”
“There’s no such thing as a sl*t, there’s no such thing as a b*tch,” Swift said in the documentary. “Toss it out, reject it, and resist it.”
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/taylor-swift-the-life-of-a-showgirl-is-so-polarizing-swifties-are-reevaluating-their-fandom-op-ed