‘How many letters?’ asked my husband, as though it were a crossword we were doing together. ‘Five,’ I replied. ‘Begins in b, ends in h.’ The clue, according to the Daily Telegraph, was that the head of Norfolk county council had told opponents not to ‘b—h and moan’. ‘Belch?’ asked my husband optimistically, adding at intervals, in exactly the same hopeful tone: ‘Blush? Birch? Bunch? Bleach?’
‘Too many letters,’ I replied to the last suggestion.
Obviously the intended word was bitch. But I wondered why it had to be blanked out. Is bitch taboo in every sense? Would it be blanked out in the Crufts sense of a female dog?
The doublet ‘bitch and moan’ is quite common. David Lammy said recently that ‘parties that air their dirty linen in public, that fight and bitch and moan, usually are a huge turn-off to the electorate’.
Of course there is all the difference in the world between calling someone a bitch and using the word with other applications. As a noun applied to a woman, the OED said of it in 1887: ‘Not now in decent use; but formerly common in literature.’ Today it warns: ‘The word is now in common colloquial use as a derogatory term for a woman but can be regarded, especially when used by a man, as misogynistic.’
Already in 1785, Francis Grose, in A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, remarked that bitch was ‘the most offensive appellation that can be given to an English woman, even more provoking than that of whore’. Sunk into lowlife, bitch lived a complicated existence. By the end of the 20th century, a Canadian journalist observed: ‘“You go, girl” is out, it seems. “Go bitch” is in.’ In American gangster speech, a bitch can be a prostitute or a girlfriend. In the gay world bitch was contrasted with butch. But words live happily in insulated silos. As a verb bitch came to mean ‘to speak cattily’ (by an irony) about other people, or simply ‘to complain’. I don’t employ it like that, but if I did I would not be calling all women bitches.
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