Word by Word
Page 17
Such a conversation is completely normal when you’re trying to figure out what words should go into which dictionary. I have spent years trying to convince horrified correspondents that the appearance of a profanity in a dictionary is merely a record of the word’s written uses, and no tender young child is learning profanity from the dictionary anyway. Taboo language of all sorts has been recorded since the earliest days of English dictionaries: John Florio’s 1598 dictionary uses the verb “fuck” in his translations of Italian. And though Johnson and Webster refused to enter such low language—Johnson for the aesthetics of it and Webster for the moral impropriety—there’s no denying that it was very much in use. So my unrufflable attitude to all manner of taboo words is not callousness on my part, nor the sly coolness of using taboo words to seem much hipper than I actually am, but simply part of my job. Very few entries faze me. Until the day I looked up the Collegiate Dictionary entry for “bitch”:
bitch noun ˈbich
1 : the female of the dog or some other carnivorous mammals
2 a : a lewd or immoral woman
b : a malicious, spiteful, or overbearing woman—sometimes used as a generalized term of abuse
3 : something that is extremely difficult, objectionable, or unpleasant
4 : COMPLAINT*1
It wasn’t an entry I had consulted before, but I was considering adding a new sense of the word and so needed to review it. As I reread it, I tilted my head, as if listening for a sound that wasn’t there. Then I heard it: this wasn’t marked in our dictionary as taboo.
Dictionaries mark taboo language in a variety of ways. Most common are labels at the beginning of the definition to warn you: “offensive,” “vulgar,” “obscene,” “disparaging,” and the like. Unfortunately, these labels can be opaque at best. What’s the difference, for instance, between “vulgar” and “obscene,” or “offensive” and “disparaging”? Don’t offensive words disparage? If something’s obscene, isn’t it also vulgar, and vice versa?
The documentation in-house is shockingly thin on how to determine whether a word should be labeled “vulgar” or “obscene.” Nothing in the Black Books, nothing in our more recent style guides, no e-mails from Gil or Steve about litmus tests we can put a word through to determine what to call it. If there’s nothing in the style files, then we have to assume that the giants who went before us thought this was so commonsensical that it didn’t merit mentioning. We must turn to the dictionary for answers to these questions. What does “vulgar” mean when used of words? The appropriate definition teased out from the Unabridged is “lewd, obscene, or profane in expression or behavior : INDECENT, INDELICATE” with the orienting quotation
Of course, I can’t label this “vulgar to some, obscene to others, sometimes vulgar to still others, sometimes offensive, mostly disparaging,” because our style rules don’t allow for it. Our style rules don’t allow for this because that’s a ridiculous statement. I find I’m bothered by the lack of a label in the Collegiate. But when the force of a profane word or slur is felt and perceived differently person to person, how can lexicographers possibly concisely communicate, with one label, its full range of use?
—
“Bitch” as a word goes back to the turn of the first millennium, when it was used as the name for a female dog, appearing quite a bit in hunting and husbandry texts where the keeping, breeding, running, and whelping of bitches was discussed. In the “dog” use, it was unremarkable: a handy little word. It’s likely that the single-mindedness of a dog in heat is what gave “bitch” its extended meaning: “a lewd woman.” Around 1400, this sense began showing up in texts; one early citation gives us a line that sounds like it’s been pulled straight from the liner notes of a heavy metal album: “þou bycche blak as kole [thou bitch black as coal].” By the time Shakespeare used the dog sense of “bitch” in Merry Wives of Windsor, the “lewd woman” sense had seeped into the language. Tellingly, most of our early evidence for this use of the word comes from plays, satires, and other tawdry tales—the pulp fiction of early English. The “lewd woman” sense of “bitch” was, in 1600, therefore considered at the very least informal.
The dictionary makers of the sixteenth century knew about “bitch,” of course, because they were cultured men who read about hunting. It’s also likely that they knew about and read the plays, satires, and morality tales that used the other meanings of “bitch”—the “lewd woman” sense and another rarely used sense referring to contemptible men. But early dictionaries included entries only for the dog-related sense of “bitch,” even though the written record, such as it is, shows that the “lewd woman” sense starts to pick up more use in the mid-sixteenth century, when most of these men were writing their dictionaries. (The general term of abuse for a man doesn’t have much of a rise in use at all.) They might have thought the meanings were too vulgar to consider entering. It’s also worth considering that early dictionaries were essentially résumés and mash notes rolled into one, so it behooved a lexicographer to consider the station and tastes of a potential patron. If including vulgar words meant that the lexicographer lost a high-powered connection at court, then the obvious answer was to omit the vulgarity in the work.*2
Leave it to Samuel Johnson to break the mold; his 1755 Dictionary is the first to include a definition for the woman-centric sense of “bitch.” It’s a striking entry for a number of reasons, not least of which was that Johnson had made it clear that he wasn’t about to keep track of slang and nonstandard words for his Dictionary. It just so happened that some well-respected Restoration writers (and a handful of nobles, for that matter*3) used this sense of “bitch” often enough in their poems and satires that Johnson considered it an established part of English.
That’s not to say that he thought the word could be used freely. Instead of defining this woman-centric use as “a lewd woman,” which is surely what the most common uses of the word meant, he defined it as “a name of reproach for a woman.” It’s not a straight-up analytical definition of “bitch”; it’s a usage warning and a definition rolled into one.
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While some early lexicographers pandered to the delicate sensibilities of the properest of the aristocracy, some went in the other direction toward sensationalism and instead focused on producing the previously mentioned canting dictionaries. “Cant” refers to a type of slang used by various groups on the seedy outskirts of society: thieves, Gypsies, criminals, scoundrels, loose women, and loud drunkards. Whatever base, whatever low, whatever dangerous: these dictionaries attempted to catalog it.
The sordid wordbooks weren’t all created for love of money; there was actual scholarly interest in “low” language. By the eighteenth century, serious lexicographers were interested in cant. John Ash, for instance, included a number of vulgar and cant words in his 1775 dictionary. He was an English Baptist minister, but his religious calling didn’t stop h
im from both snagging most of Johnson’s entry for “bitch” and being the first lexicographer to enter both “cunt” and “fuck” into a general-language, monolingual English dictionary and, unlike Bailey, define them in English.
In 1785, Francis Grose, an educated gentleman with a knack for a good story, published A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, which entered both cant and what Grose called “those Burlesque Phrases, Quaint Allusions, and Nick-names for persons, things and places, which from long uninterrupted usage are made classical by prescription.” It was the first general dictionary devoted to the bottom end of the vernacular, not just canting slang. Grose and his assistant, the aptly and delightfully named Tom Cocking, didn’t just sit over a good dinner and concoct vocabulary: they went on midnight strolls through London, collecting slang words from the docks, the streets, the taverns of ill repute, and the slums, then publishing them in Grose’s work. It would be fair to say that Grose and Cocking therefore probably had a very good grasp of how vulgar terms were being used in that moment by ordinary people.
Grose includes this entry for “bitch”:
BITCH, a she dog, or dogess; the most offensive apellation [sic] that can be given to an English woman, even more provoking than that of whore, as may be gathered from the regular Billin[g]sgate or St. Giles’s answers, “I may be a whore, but can’t be a bitch.”
A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue includes a good number of impolite and rough words; it is worth noting, then, that he calls “bitch” “the most offensive” name a woman can be called. The big lexicographers stuck with Johnson’s shorter treatment. Webster steals Johnson’s treatment for his 1828 American Dictionary and also eschews a label: the definition itself was warning enough. Joseph Worcester, another American lexicographer,*4 included it in his 1828 abridgment of Johnson’s Dictionary, also stealing Johnson’s treatment, though he makes the choice to omit it from his own 1830 Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language. He notes in the preface that he will not “corrupt the language,” and indeed no profanity of any sort is found in Worcester’s 1830 Dictionary or in any of his following dictionaries.*5
But the lure of Johnson was too strong. By 1860, Worcester had caved to “bitch” and added Johnson’s second definition to his dictionary. This was the status quo until the end of the nineteenth century. The “name of reproach” definition remained unchanged in dictionaries for well over a hundred years, from 1755 onward.
The actual uses of the word, however, were not so stable. You can get a lovely sense of the rich verdure of “bitch” by reading through the archived proceedings at the Old Bailey, London’s chief criminal court from 1674 through 1913. The testimonies, which read like British police procedurals, are rife with “bitches,” and few of those for the dog. Most uses of “bitch” found there are the term of abuse directed at women, but as early as 1726 we also find evidence of the word “bitch” used of a gay man:
There were 8 or 9 of them in a large Room, one was playing upon a Fiddle, and others were one while dancing in obscene Postures, and other while Singing baudy Songs, and talking leudly, and Acting a great many Indecencies. —But they look’d a skew upon Mark Partridge, and call’d him a treacherous, blowing-up Mollying Bitch, and threatned that they’d Massacre any body that betray’d them.
The use of “bitch” as a derogatory term pointed at men predates the Old Bailey: it goes back to 1475 (“Be God, he ys a schrewd byche”). It certainly didn’t have the use that the woman-centric “bitch” did, but it shows up with some regularity, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Henry Fielding uses it in Tom Jones, and Robert Burns uses it in his Scottish dialect poems of the late eighteenth century. This derogatory use even snuck into college slang of the early nineteenth century: at Cambridge, the student who always served during tea (taking the maid’s or mother’s place) was called “a bitch.” The thrust of each of these uses was clear: men who were called “bitches” were feminized, or less than men.
The eighteenth century thus saw “bitch” bifurcated into two main meaning trunks: one trunk that referred to all things female and feminine, and a new trunk that instead tapped into the difficulty of controlling a bitch in heat. From this, we get the sense of “bitch” applied to difficult or uncontrollable things; from the mid-eighteenth century onward, “bitch” is applied to fortune, poverty, necessity, a boat that stubbornly resists repair, the star that ruled over Lord Byron’s love life, and so on.
All these uses of the noun “bitch,”*6 attested to in a wide variety of sources and not a one of them entered into a dictionary for hundreds of years.
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“It doesn’t have a label?” Emily asked, frowning. “Really. None?”
We were standing in her kitchen, scuffing around in our socks, having a glass of wine and talking about the day. It’s an occupational hazard that work follows the lexicographer home. You spend all day elbows-deep in the language, so it’s inevitable that you can’t scrub it all off when you leave the building.
We began running through the scenarios together. Could it be, we wondered, that somehow the label got dropped accidentally? It did happen: revision slips occasionally went missing, having been clipped to the wrong galley or having fallen off entirely. Maybe the data I was looking at just wasn’t up to date. Emily leaned on the counter. Maybe, she offered, the usage note about the word being a generalized term of abuse was meant to cover both the non-“whore” sense of “bitch” when used as a slur against women and the “weak, ineffectual” sense of “bitch” when used as a slur against men. She moved her wineglass from one hand to the other. “A usage note could take care of both.”
“Only if it’s its own sense,” I said. “This usage note is attached to the ‘malicious, spiteful, or overbearing woman’ sense.”
“So it can’t be in reference to men.”
“No.”
“Or just…women in general. Like women who don’t respond to assholes who catcall them on the street.”
“Or women who don’t play into hyper-feminized stereotypes.”
“Right.”
“You know, ‘bitches get shit done,’ that sort of use. Though,” I said, “I suppose that’s really a reclamation of the slur. Which means—”
“Oy,” she groaned, and took a very large gulp of wine.
—
Jo Freeman’s pamphlet The BITCH Manifesto was written in 1968 and published in 1970, right as second-wave feminism crested. The year of the manifesto’s creation, “sexism” was first used in print, and the first public protest against restrictive abortion laws happened in New York City; the year of its publication, the feminist activist Bella Abzug was elected to Congress, and two branches of the Lutheran Church in the United States began ordaining women. What Americans thought about women—and how they talked about them—was in flux. Jo Freeman decided it was time to control the narrative on one particular word that had been applied to women. “A woman should be proud to declare she is a Bitch,” Freeman writes, “because Bitch is Beautiful. It should be an act of affirmation by self and not negation by others.”
One part of many identity movements is linguistic reclamation. This is a process by which a maligned group—women, gay men, people of color, the disabled, and so on—take an inflammatory slur that’s been directed at them as a group and begin using it themselves as an identity marker of pride. It’s done to remove power from the oppressor, the linguistic version of catching an arrow shot at you in flight.
But reclamation isn’t always so straightforward. First, it assumes that the community which is maligned is just that—a single community, rather than a diverse group of people who happen to share a particular ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, or state of life. Take the case most often held up as a reclamation success story: “queer,” which was reclaimed by the AIDS activist group Queer Nation in the 1990s. Through the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, “queer” came to be used as a t
ongue-in-cheek synonym for “gay,” even appearing in the titles of TV shows like Queer as Folk and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It was adopted as a label within the gay community first to describe gayness in all its manifestations, then to describe those who didn’t want to identify within the traditional binaries: gay/straight, man/woman, male/female. It is just one identity available to those who find their home in the LGBTQIA movement.*7
And yet, its reclamation was not as universally successful as portrayed. John Kichi, a gay man in his sixties, was horrified in 2013 to find “queer” listed as a gender on a job application. “I think queer harkens back to a time when being gay was a documented medical abnormality,” he told a local news station. “Every one of my gay friends is appalled by this.”
The same uneven pattern of reclamation is happening with “bitch.” Feminists (mostly white) began to reclaim it in the 1960s and 1970s, while plenty of other women rejected—and continue to reject—the attempt. No matter how commonplace the word became in culture, the naysayers claimed, it was still used negatively. The authors of a 2009 paper in Sociological Analysis summarize the anti-reclamation argument: “As feminism taught us long ago, the personal is political; women who normalize ‘bitch’ also normalize sexism.”
The point of linguistic reclamation is to kill the potency of a slur. If I turn “bitch” on its head and use it to refer to a strong-willed, strong-minded woman, isn’t that use just as valid—if not more so—as the original slur, or are the authors of that Sociological Analysis paper right that “putting ‘bitches’ into the atmosphere, over and again, sends the message that it is acceptable for men to use the term”?