The Evolution of "Bitch" in the English Language
October 8, 2014 11:20 AM   Subscribe

Bitch: A History This past semester at MIT I took a really wonderful class called “Feminist Political Thought” which had a very open ended essay assignment. I wrote a history of the word “Bitch,” and several of my classmates requested to read the whole paper so I thought I’d post it here.
posted by Michele in California (23 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
Looks like in the 80s there was a decline in bitch usage when high school girls would fondly call each other Bimbette instead. Radical.
posted by waving at 11:28 AM on October 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


all female dogs are bitches, just as all female cats are queens. i think we can tell who got the lexicographical upper hand there. +1 for team kitteh!
posted by bruce at 11:39 AM on October 8, 2014 [7 favorites]


Wow, well-written paper!

Props (from a former English tutor).
posted by CrowGoat at 11:45 AM on October 8, 2014


This reminds me of Heartless Bitches International, who have my eternal gratitude for their scathing articles on "Nice Guys". ("Grow a pair!")
posted by quiet earth at 12:15 PM on October 8, 2014


Just happened to be reading this over at Deadspin right before checking my MeFi feed.
posted by tonycpsu at 12:19 PM on October 8, 2014


tonycpsu: how'd that get past this guy ?
posted by k5.user at 12:23 PM on October 8, 2014


I know I'm biased, but I love MIT students, I really really do.
posted by maryr at 12:25 PM on October 8, 2014


Its use as an insult was propagated into Old English by the Christian rulers of the Dark Age to suppress the idea of femininity as sacred.

Which rulers? What age? Try to make this clearer.

Also, the Porkington Ms 10 is now in the National Library of Wales as Brogyntyn Ms ii.1 ("Porkington" is the anglicized form of Brogyntyn, the name of the Shropshire estate of the Barons Harlech*, from whence the ms came.)

(*Fun—or not so fun—fact: Alice Ormsby-Gore, daughter of the 5th Baron Harlech, was engaged to Eric Clapton. Clapton broke off the engagement and Alice ultimately OD'd on smack.)
posted by octobersurprise at 12:31 PM on October 8, 2014 [6 favorites]


so tell me, maryr, what's your favorite law school?
posted by bruce at 12:33 PM on October 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


I'm not sure if you're asking sincerely or not, but I don't have a favorite law school. My favorite law students went to Washington University, but I don't think that's relevant.
posted by maryr at 12:47 PM on October 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


"nowadays"?

Also, I'm no linguist, but I understand that relying on Google n-grams for corpus studies isn't quite cricket.

Fun read though.
posted by billcicletta at 1:16 PM on October 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


"...the uses of bitch can be grouped into three categories of meaning:
1. Malicious or consciously attempting to harm"


I sort of thought that defined the C-word.
My2C
posted by xtian at 2:22 PM on October 8, 2014


Bitca?
posted by allthinky at 2:31 PM on October 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


This is, like, fine and all for an MIT student, but totally ignores a bunch of broader shifts that accompany the rise of the use of "bitch" in the history of literature over the first half of the 20th century that I'd expect to be caught on project proposal: changing sorts of fiction across all social registers in the English-speaking world, the rise of crime fiction and other intentionally vulgar genres, social realism, and a general move towards less refined language in books. (there are other complicating factors, I'm sure, but that's off the top of my head) For example, here's some cusses in ngrams, smoothing-free. This doesn't change the fact that "bitch" does rise starting in the twenties; still, while ngrams can be a fun tool, it's a crummy substitute for teaching historical thinking.
posted by The Bridge on the River Kai Ryssdal at 2:42 PM on October 8, 2014 [5 favorites]


I was kinda wondering if "bich is slang for generosity" was going to show up in this. It did not.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:45 PM on October 8, 2014


"Its use as an insult was propagated into Old English by the Christian rulers of the Dark Age to suppress the idea of femininity as sacred."

What nonsense.

First, the use of the term "Dark Age" is a great signal flare that the author is either making facts up, or quoting outdated and suspect histories. There was no "Dark Age". While Rome burned, Celts made golden artifacts of staggering complexity, and Byzantium flourished. Moslems in the Iberian peninsula studied astronomy and algebra.

Second: this ridiculous claim needs a citation. The author is claiming that she knows the very intent of rulers who "propagated" a word's contextual usage. Who are these mysterious, language-altering "Christian rulers"? And how exactly did they control the language?

And what is the importance of their religion, since all European rulers (including the progressively feminist ruling women of the Occitan) were Christian? It's not like Christians were the only misogynists around in this period.
posted by IAmBroom at 8:48 PM on October 8, 2014 [11 favorites]


There was no "Dark Age". While Rome burned, Celts made golden artifacts of staggering complexity, and Byzantium flourished. Moslems in the Iberian peninsula studied astronomy and algebra.

"India was a mighty nation then while Englishmen still dwelt in caves and painted themselves blue."
posted by misha at 11:53 PM on October 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


Needs to be paired with a study of the word dog from insult to rapper's term of endearment in the Western christian world.
posted by Marauding Ennui at 1:48 AM on October 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


MIT?

WTF?
posted by IndigoJones at 9:57 AM on October 9, 2014


I really wanted to like this, but unfortunately the parts referring to the early history of the word at least are really slapdash. For example, take this part:
The insult “son of a bitch” (biche sone in Old English) originated to ridicule spiritual pagans, who worshipped the bitch goddess Diana1. The phrase evolved to mean a generally despicable or otherwise hateful man.
From the "1" I deduce that this is from Geoffrey Hughes' An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World. Looking at that book, Hughes says:
[T]he 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) [...]
(Side note: 1330 makes this most definitely Middle English, not Old English, and yes it makes a huge difference given the political and cultural repercussions of 1066 and all that.)

Hughes offers not a single citation of any use of bicce in Old English, or Old Norse. (1330 is most definitely Middle English, not Old.) So we have no way of knowing if he is correct or not about what the early applications were. And in fact, looking at Arthur and Merlin, we can find reason to be dubious of his assessment there too. Here's the relevant part:
He grad aloude to king Taurus
"Abide þou þef malicious.
Biche-sone þou drawest amis,
Þou schalt abigge it, ywis."
No doubt, King Taurus (a Saxon) is being called a son of a bitch! But what basis do we have that this is intended to insult his mother by implying that she is promiscuous or sensual rather than simply by implying that she must not even be human? In fact, it's worth noting that when he first appears a few lines above, Taurus is introduced as follows:
Þat heþen king, þat vnwrast hounde,
Þat feloun rage in his wodenesse,
So Taurus himself is also likened to a dog. I mean, at this point there's reason to doubt if biche-sone was meant to imply anything specific about the addressee's mother at all, let alone a specific charge of promiscuity, let alone a more specific charge of pagan promiscuity. It could just have been a roundabout way of calling someone a dog, with any insult to the mother secondary and unintended. (C.f. the modern gag whereby a mother calls her own offspring a "son of a bitch", failing to see the irony.)

Incidentally, the Chester Play citation Hughes also offers is as far as I can tell a woman speaking to a man (a soldier, to be specific — it's pretty badass, actually). Check it out:
Whom calleste thou queine, skabde biche.
Thy dame thy daster was never suche,
Shee borned a knave eiche stiche,
Yet did I never non.
To summarize, I'm not seeing actual evidence of a word ancestral to bitch being used as a direct insult for women at all before the 18th century, let alone on "Christian" grounds. (I'm not saying that such evidence doesn't exist — in fact I tend to suspect that it does — but it just isn't being produced.) This is not how philology should be done, and sadly it undermines the part about the 20th century, in which I think some interesting points are in fact made.

Now if you'll excuse me I have to finish sewing leather elbow patches on my pipe before the next volume of Margaret Cone's Dictionary of Pali arrives.
posted by No-sword at 10:46 PM on October 10, 2014 [2 favorites]


A further note about the Chester Play cycle: it seems that other texts replace "biche" with "dogge", like the one linked here.
Whom callest thou 'queane,' scabde dogge?
Thy dame, thy daystard, was never syche.
Shee burned a kylne, eych stike;
yet did I never non.
(Note the third line has changed a bit, too.) It seems likely that "biche" was the original, because it matches the rhyme pattern, and dogge doesn't. This suggests that at some point after the original composition, an editor or copyist had misgivings about calling a man a "biche", and changed it to a non-gendered version of the same insult. Who? When? Why, exactly? I don't know, but those would be good questions for a history of the word "bitch" to explore...
posted by No-sword at 10:52 PM on October 10, 2014 [2 favorites]


I actually was looking for something else when I tripped across this. I did not find anything akin to what I was looking for, which is some kind of information on the different uses of the word "bitch" by various ethnicities. Of course, I was looking for something on current usage patterns and different intent depending on various cultural factors, which is going to be a more hot button topic than writing about the history of something. I kind of did not expect to find anything at all, so I was somewhat pleased to find this, regardless of its shortcomings.
posted by Michele in California at 9:42 AM on October 11, 2014 [1 favorite]


No-sword, you managed in a very few paragraphs to provide more information (instead of mere propaganda for the author's thesis) than this MIT student did in her whole website.

Great work.
posted by IAmBroom at 8:45 AM on October 13, 2014


« Older Voluntary tonsuring did not carry the ignominy of...   |   Before the Sistine Chapel Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments