by Kory Stamper
What if the women reclaiming the word are black women wresting it from male rappers? Does that give the reclamation more—or less—legitimacy? And who gets to say how legitimate black use of “bitch” is? And isn’t it pretty racially untranscendent to talk about “black women” reclaiming “bitch” as if all black women were part of the same community? What about other women of color?
What happens if men try to call women “bitch” as a compliment? What happens if straight men do it? How about gay men, or men who identify as feminists? Are men even allowed to be a part of the reclamation process? While we’re at it: use of the female dog sense of “bitch” has declined over the last thirty or so years, and now you’re just as likely to see “she-dog” or “female dog” or even “girl dog” in print as you are to encounter this sense of “bitch.” Can I still call a bitch “a bitch”?
And at the heart, a personal conundrum: How does a lexicographer, who sits within a particular cultural moment, with their own thoughts, feelings, experiences, prejudices (known and unknown), and assumptions—who is tasked with describing, to the best of their ability, the main denotative and connotative meanings of a word—adequately capture and communicate this mucky, hot mess?
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Lexicography is linguistic surgery. There’s a ritual preparation, a laying out of instruments (pencils, notepads, computer mouse, database). Sometimes there’s music in the operating room; sometimes just the whir of machines and the thin-ice silence of concentration robing you like a blanket. There is the first slice into the patient, which could be the beginning of a very long morning full of unexpected complications or the start of a procedure so routine a seasoned surgeon could do it in their sleep.
Surgeons and lexicographers exist within a strange lived duality: your patient—human or verbal—is at once an anonymous sum of parts that you can label, work on, know. Yet at the same time, those parts work in concert with other parts to form a person with a name, a family, a community, a dog, bills, a history, a mystery scar on the chin that you, in your expertise, cannot account for. You are an expert of the part and cannot hope to describe the whole.
It comes down to what’s there and how it got there: the meaning of “bitch” as it is applied to women. There are currently two senses to wrangle:
2 a: a lewd or immoral woman
b : a malicious, spiteful, or overbearing woman—sometimes used as a generalized term of abuse
I knew the history of each use, but I was curious about the history of the definitions themselves. The more I thought about the definitions, the more they itched and prickled. Yes, “bitch” has been used of a woman who is held to be lewd or immoral; it has been used of a woman who is held to be malicious, spiteful, or overbearing. But is that the same as “bitch” being used of a woman who is lewd or immoral or who is malicious, spiteful, or overbearing? I scooted back from my desk as quietly as possible—my desk chair, a metal and cork contraption from the mid-1960s, squonks like a goose being sat upon, regardless of what high-tech oil I squirt into its decrepit bearings—and padded over to the consolidated files, where all the historical evidence for “bitch” was held. The drawer was jam-packed; the evidence for “bitch” was nine linear inches of paper.
The evolution of the definition is split between two different dictionaries: the unabridged dictionaries, which go back to the 1860s and have changed names a few times, and the Collegiate dictionaries, which were originally abridgments of the unabridged dictionaries. The paper trail begins with the entries from the first Webster’s New International Dictionary of 1909, an unabridged dictionary. There is just one card in the stack, a drafted entry for what was then sense 2 of “bitch,” complete with editing marks:
2. An opprobriously, name for a woman, esp. a lewd woman; also : in less offensively, applied to a man. “Landlord is a vast comical bitch.” Fielding.
This definition doesn’t appear in Webster’s New International Dictionary, however. What appears in the 1909 is the unedited first half of that definition: “an opprobrious name for a woman, esp. a lewd woman.” There are no notes explaining why the “also” was deleted.
For Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, released in 1934 (and so referred to in-house as W34), the definition was overhauled again. It was given as “Opprobriously, a woman, esp. a lewd woman; also, formerly, less offensively, a man. Vulgar.” This is where the revision proposed decades earlier had ended up, with one notable addition. The assistant editor who wrote this definition, Percy Long, appended a note to his definition: “The citation from the Sat. Review shows that temper as well as morals may be stigmatized by the word. Colloquially it is used to indicate ill will or meanness quite as often as lewdness.” The note is undated, but we can assume it was written prior to 1931, when John Bethel, an assistant editor, left this riposte: “ ‘also, formerly,…a man.’ This is of course all wet in its use of ‘formerly.’ It’s extremely common in 1931.” Bethel’s note was rejected.
There’s significant chatter in the editorial files about the revisions needed to the Second’s definition. John Bethel left a mammoth note in May 1947, breaking down just how wrong the definition found in the Second is. He calls for a separation of the one broad sense into separate subsenses for applications to women, men, and things; notes that the use of “bitch” of men is still in use, regardless of what W34 says; and notes that “bitch” as it was used in the mid-1940s wasn’t merely “colorless”—that is, merely another word for “woman”—but did imply that there was something wrong with the woman who was being called a “bitch.” He closes his note with “In the specific applications the term often, of course, implies ‘loose morals,’ but in other contexts it (? almost equally often) implies spitefulness or some other extreme flaw of disposition.”
Bethel retired in 1952 and moved to the Bahamas but was kept on as a consultant. He tried again to press for a separation of senses in 1954, and another assistant editor, Daniel Cook, took up the charge a year later.
The real changes to the definition came with the 1961 Webster’s Third New International, Unabridged. The revision of “bitch” for the Third fell to Mairé Weir Kay, an associate editor for the Third. She was a formidable, no-nonsense woman who demanded excellence and could be brusque or intimidating if she found your work lacking. For most of the post-Third years, she was functionally (though not titularly) the editor in chief and was known for the almost forty years she was on staff only as “Miss Kay.” She was, in short, the embodiment of the reclaimed “bitch.”
The files show her crisp date stamp on a host of citations and notes dating back to the 1920s. There are two drafted definitions of hers for “bitch” in our files, from 1956, when primary defining on the Third was under way. Taken together, her revisions are as follows:
The synonymous cross-references make us wince today. “Trollop,” “slut,” “virago”? What about Bethel’s comment that the word as used nowadays often refers to the male view of the woman and not the actual character of the woman? Miss Kay hedged on that by adding the two usage notes: “a generalized term of abuse” and “usu. used disparagingly.” This is the lexicographer’s loophole: when this word is used to disparage, this is the meaning that speakers and writers of the word give it.
The third sense was struck by Cook, though there is enough evidence in the files to support it. Sense 2a made it in without edits. Sense 2b was edited down by Cook to “a malicious, spiteful, and domineering woman.” The general meaning of “woman”—the one that gets used when men lean out their car windows and scream “Hey, bitch!” at a woman whose character they cannot comment on because they do not know her; the one that was used in testimony at the Old Bailey in the seventeenth century, as in “I’ll see you hang’d, you Bitch!”—was gone. The usage label that Miss Kay added, “usu. used disparagingly,” was also gone. In its place is a definition with no usage warning, no qualifying label, nothing. Lexicographically, this use of “bitch” is no different from the use of the noun
“baseball” or “milk” or “sweetheart.”
Also of note: the “and” in 2b. By this definition, the word “bitch” is only applicable if the woman in question is malicious, spiteful, and domineering. If she’s benignly domineering or meek yet malicious, then this sense of “bitch” doesn’t apply. But looking through the citations marked as “used” for this entry, it’s clear that the “and” is a misstep: it really should be “or.” Small words have big consequences.
The evolution of “bitch” in the Collegiate is more varied. The first edition of the Collegiate (published in 1898) used the same definition for “bitch” that the unabridged 1864 American Dictionary of the English Language had used: “an opprobrious name for a woman,” which was a gussied-up version of Webster’s 1828 definition. For the Seventh Edition in 1963, the definitions were revised along the lines of the definitions in the Third: “a lewd or immoral woman” and “a malicious, spiteful, and domineering woman.” The Collegiate now had two meanings of “bitch” that were clearly disparaging yet did not carry any stigmatizing label.
It wasn’t until the Tenth Edition of the Collegiate that a usage note showed up in the entry again—this time, at the “malicious, spiteful, domineering” sense. The usage warning was introduced thanks to Susan Brady, one of our associate editors, who left a pink for the copy editor noting that a label was warranted at the entry. Steve, acting as copy editor, inserted the suggest note: “—sometimes used as a generalized term of abuse.” Gil, acting as final reader, stamped the note as closed. Closed or not, the note was annotated one more time: our editor in chief, Fred Mish, didn’t dispute Gil’s decision, but did make his feelings clear with a comment on the pink. “But most often,” he wrote, “it means just what the definition says and is not generalized.” This exchange happened in the final stages of defining for the Tenth; it was 1992.
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“Uuuuuugh,” my fellow lexicographer Jane Solomon groaned. We had been talking about editing and the difficulty of not bringing your own views and biases to an entry, and I mentioned “bitch.” What was wrong with it, she asked, and I held up my index finger—wait for it. It didn’t even have a “disparaging” label, I told her. She answered, “Ohhhh, oh God.”
We had started the conversation talking about the word “microaggression.” It’s a relatively new term that refers to the small slights or comments directed particularly at a member of a minority group that could be perceived as inconsequential but are in fact some sort of attack. Mansplaining is often seen as a type of microaggression: a woman can never have the last word, even on something that she’s the expert on. Jane had been tasked with defining “microaggression” for one of the online dictionaries she worked on, and we had been talking about the difficulty of getting rid of unconscious editorial bias in definitions that touched on sensitive issues, like “microaggression.” She went back and forth with the editor reviewing her entry; Jane had run the definition by a friend who was a civil rights activist to make sure that she had gotten a good grasp on the word’s denotative and connotative meaning. But the edits made to her definition were from what she considered to be “a rich, white perspective, unfortunately.” Her editor had changed the force of the definition so that the word “microaggression” referred to comments that were merely perceived to be offensive. “But, no,” she said, “they’re just offensive—but offensive in a way that’s not always obvious to the person who is perpetrating the offense.”
The problem that lexicographers face with a reclaimed word like “bitch” is the same problem that Jane’s struggle with the definition of “microaggression” is, just writ large. The force of the word’s full meaning is contained in something that lexicographers can’t measure: the interplay between intention and reception. What’s more important: the intention of the speaker or the reception by the hearer? If I walk down the street and hear a man I do not know, hanging out of his car window, yell, “Nice, bitch!” at me, I will probably not respond as if he had yelled “Nice day!” I will feel disparaged; therefore, I will assume that he meant to disparage, even if he meant to compliment.
Would I feel differently if a woman yelled it at me? Maybe—that depends on my previous experiences with women calling me and each other “bitch,” the use of “nice,” the tone of voice the caller delivers the statement in, what mood I’m in at that exact moment, how old I am (for I find, as I get older, that I can be bothered less and less with randos on the street hollering dumb shit at me and am more apt to return the insult in kind, thereby proving their initial claim that I am, in fact, a bitch), and whether I think the holler refers to me or, let’s say, my teenage daughter who might be walking with me. Is this my own bias against men using “bitch”? Absolutely, one informed by a lifetime of having men sneer “bitch” at me for any reason, all reasons, and no reasons. Can I, in that two-second interlude as the car passes by, even pretend to divine the speaker’s intention? And further, I need to consider the possibility that, what with people being such complex animals with palimpsested feelings, the man or woman in question doesn’t quite know what exactly they mean when they yell “Nice, bitch!” at me.
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There’s always another person in this equation, not just the speaker and the hearer: the bystander. Because this is what the lexicographer is, in the end—a linguistic bystander. We are not involved in the initial back-and-forth; we only hear about it later, and then in flat prose. What are we to make of citations like these?
• an actress recently described as the reigning bitch of the movies.
• It contains his two most memorable characters: Leila Bucknell, the irresistible siren and invincibly successful bitch, who manages to be financed by a succession of lovers without losing her position in smart society.
• …was a hard bitch.
• “So someone calls you a bitch?” says Tanisha of BWP. “That’s what they call any woman who’s tough and good at business. We say, wear the title as a badge of honor and keep getting yours.”
Are these uses of “bitch” generalized abuse? Disparaging? It’s hard to tell. Some of the citations are so short that you can’t even tell if the referent is a woman or a man. The last citation is clearly a remark on the reclamation of “bitch,” but it doesn’t give you enough information to tell what, exactly, Tanisha of BWP thinks the unreclaimed “bitch” means.
Some dictionaries take on reclamation not with standard definitions but with short essays. Dictionary.com has a short essay on “bitch” that explains that the force of the word depends on who says it and what the intention behind it is. It goes on to talk a bit about the reclamation of “bitch” in the broadest of strokes. It’s imperfect, of course—whole books could be written about the word “bitch”—but it’s a start, and as dictionaries move online, it’s something that more publishers could indulge in.
But this doesn’t do away with the two major difficulties of defining reclaimed slurs. The first is that lexicographers have to try to give a general overview of the most common uses of a word, which means that lexicographers need to place themselves squarely in the middle of the most painful lexical interactions and pick them apart to describe them. The reason why lexicographers are loath to wade into this mess leads to the second difficulty: lexicography has historically been (and, frankly, continues to be) the province of well-off, educated, old white dudes. There are today likely more women who are lexicographers than men, but the landscape of lexicography is still overwhelmingly beige. Our own biases are difficult to see, and lexicographers don’t always do a good job of setting them aside, because we are only human and eternally under deadline. Daniel Cook couldn’t see in 1956 that the second sense of “bitch” really was disparaging; Fred Mish struggled with the same statement in 1992. The people who pointed out that “bitch” was disparaging when used of women were both women, editors who had lived the experience of “bitch.”
Modern lexicographers are trained to be objective and leave their own linguistic baggage at the door;
modern lexicography is set up to make the definer anonymous and incorporeal. But language is deeply personal, even for the lexicographer: it’s the way that we describe who we are, what the world around us is, delineate what we think is good from what we think is bad. The nursery rhyme “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me” is a lie that every five-year-old knows in their deep waters. Words hurt, because they are one of the only socially accepted ways we can attack each other, and suddenly the retiring lexicographer is right in the middle of the melee. When a white lexicographer has to edit the entry for “nigger,” they are aware of the centuries of attack the word represents. They are also aware of the attempts to reclaim the word, to wrest from the oppressor that power to unmake a person, and to use the worst slur imaginable as a point of pride. They know they are outside this reclamation. They know that they are, by dint of their whiteness, their education, their position in society, implicated in part of the problem that “nigger” represents. How can that white lexicographer possibly do right by the word “nigger” and all the various opinions on it?
Words are not just personal but corporeal. Lexicographers can grow inured to slurs while defining them—how many times can you read the word “bitch” before it stops even looking like an English word?—but we all have our own lived experiences in the world that prove words have substance. We write them with our hands, we speak them with our mouths, we bear the scars they inflict in our bodies: the fish-line twist of my mother’s mouth, sucking on “bitch” like a canker sore as she talks about what it was like to be a woman manager in manufacturing; the three droplets of spittle that hitched a ride with the affricate and flew from the mouth of my dad’s friend, in profile against the western sun, as he called his ex-wife a bitch; the heat rash of anger and embarrassment (why embarrassment?) that flares up my cheeks as the cacophony of the city splits like a curtain and allows “bitch” to hang in the spotlight for an airless moment; the fist that clenches in my chest as the car rounds the corner, trailing male laughter and a whiff of gasoline.