8/15/2023 0 Comments Bitch use your words![]() But since there is another eighteenth century use of the sense of to complain, that would seem to have been Burke’s meaning, not a new sense of the word.īut these eighteenth-century uses are rare, and the verb doesn’t appear again until the twentieth century in the United States. The OED defines this as an early instance of to bitch with the sense of to hang back. Norton bitched a little at last but though he would recede, Fox stuck to his motion for the honour of the House and they were obliged to admit it. But Burke, Charles Fox, and others supported Norton, and it was eventually entered. The speaker of the House of Commons, Fletcher Norton, gave a speech that some thought insulting to the king and objected to being entered into the record. From Edward Ward’s 1745 A Compleat and Humorous Account of the Remarkable Clubs and Societies in the Cities of London and Westminster:Ī Leaden-Hall Butcher would be bitching his Wife, for not only opening her Placket, but her Pocket-Apron to his Rogue of a Journeyman, and expensively treating the young strong back’d Rascal at the Ship Tavern, whilst himself was entering his Puppy at the Bear Garden.Īnd there is this from a letter by Edmund Burke of. ![]() The verb to bitch, meaning to complain, which comes from a metaphor of a nagging or complaining woman, makes a few appearances in eighteenth-century British speech. As women started pushing for greater inclusion in public life, men started to tear them down. This surge in use of the insult corresponds with first-wave feminism and the women’s suffrage movement. The phrase son of a bitch may literally be a derogatory reference to a woman, but as an idiom it often does not have that connotation and is used as a general term of abuse. The table here shows the word’s appearances in the Corpus of Historical American English in the first four decades of the twentieth century, broken down by sense: literal reference to a dog, reference to a woman, the phrase son of a bitch, and other uses (i.e., as a surname or as a general swear word). In American English, it was rarely heard before the 1920s, when its use suddenly exploded. But while the derogatory use of bitch to refer to a woman may be ancient, in English, at least, it was rather uncommon until relatively recently. There are undoubtedly other such instances in various ancient languages. ![]() With difficulty I fled out of doors and escaped. ![]() (To get it away, she seized my hand with her teeth. Ut eum eriperet, manum arripuit mordicus. In Act 5 of his play Curculio, Plautus (c.254–184 BCE) describes a fight between a man and a woman over a ring: The words “fulan horan and byccan” (foul whores and bitches) replace “fracodan myltestran” (wicked harlots) in Ælfric’s original.īut the practice of referring to women as dogs didn’t start in the twelfth century, but rather at the very least a thousand years before that. Who kill their children before they can become adults) (the foul fornicators and the foul whores and bitches Ðe acwellað heora cild ær þan ðe hit cuð beo mannum Ða fulan forliras, and ða fulan horan and byccan (One may quibble over whether this instance is Old English or Early Middle English, as it dates to the twelfth century.) The word appears in the manuscript Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.34, which contains a copy of Ælfric’s homily “Sermo ad Populum.” Ælfric wrote in the closing years of the tenth century, but a twelfth-century hand has emended the text in this manuscript. The fifth appearance of the word in the Old English corpus is an epithet for a woman. To do away with corns and warts, take wool and wet it with bitch’s urine, bind it to the warts and corns.) (If you frequently smear and touch a child’s gums with bitch’s milk, the teeth grow without pain. Wearras & weartan onweg to donne, nim wulle & wæt mid biccean hlonde, wrið on þa weartan & on þa wearras. Two others appear in a medical text:īiccean meolc gif ðu gelome cilda toðreoman mid smyrest & æthrinest, butan sare hy wexað. Two of these are simple glosses of the Latin canicula (female dog). The Old English bicce appears five times in the extant corpus. It’s an old word, dating to Old English, but the practice of referring to women as dogs is much, much older than the English language itself. Near rhymes work great for songwriting, often giving a more interesting feel than perfect rhymes.The word bitch is used to refer to a female dog, and the word is also used as a derogatory term for a woman, and it is used in the idiomatic epithet son of a bitch and as a verb meaning to complain. To see our full selection of genre-specific rhymes, triggers that get your creativity flowing, and next line suggestions from our incredible A.I.
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