Originally Posted by feminvstr  interesting its origin
Where does the term bitch "female dog" come from and how did it get applied to women?
The word originally referred to female animals, especially dogs. It dates from about 1000 in the Old English written record and was bicce. Beyond that, etymologists cannot really say very much with authority. There is an Old Norse word bikkja with the same meaning, but it is unclear whether it came from the Old English word, or vice versa, or whether they are cognate with one another (meaning they have a common source). The OED suggests (by way of Jacob Grimm, German linguist and folklorist of the 19th century), that if the Old Norse word were the original, it may have come from Lappish pittja, though the Lappish word could have come from the Norse, too. There is a German word betze (or petze), but word historians seem to think that it is simply the Germanized form of the English word. Then there is French biche "bitch" and "fawn", but whether those are related to each other and/or the English word is not known. So, to sum up, we just don't know much about the word's earliest roots.
We can, however, see how bitch came to be applied to women. It was being used thus as early as 1400 and referred to a lewd or sensual woman. It was not uncommon to use it in literature of the time in that sense. It was simply a metaphor, comparing lewd women to female dogs, which, if left to their own devices, will bear pups rather frequently, suggesting sexual promiscuity. The more modern meaning of "malicious or treacherous woman" seems to have arisen in the 19th century, and Kipling used it metaphorically (thus, etymologically using a double metaphor!) in Traffics & Discoveries: "After eight years, my father, cheated by your bitch of a country, he found out who was the upper dog in South Africa" (1904).
If you were wondering, son of a bitch (in the form bitch-son) first appears in the written record in 1330 in Of Arthur & of Merlin, but we don't find it again until Shakespeare's time (1605) in King Lear: "One that...art nothing but the composition of a Knave, Begger, Coward, Pandar, and the Sonne and Heire of a Mungrill Bitch." |
03-27-2008, 07:29 PM
