Bitch: A History.

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).