"to bitch" [Was: Link to NY City Council "Bitch & Ho" Resolution]

[Joel S. Berson]

At 8/7/2007 03:31 PM, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>Are your 18C attestations clearly in the 'grumble' sense, or could
>they possibly mean 'call someone a bitch', as in the 1709 OED cite,
>"In wonderful Rage went to Cursing and Bitching"?

At the moment I only have the fragment "if 'you Bitch' you are 'tied
up and whipped to that Degree that you'd not serve an Animal'", and
from the secondary source.

The inner quotation was (I am assuming) uttered by a female convict
sentenced to transportation from England to America.  It seems pretty
clear to me that it is "grumble" -- or worse.

There is an interesting question about origin.  The primary source
document is a letter written from England to America, and not by the
female convict but by a trader in transports.  OED2 says for this
sense (OED2, v.2, sense 3) "orig. U.S.".  I do not know yet whether
the convict said this before, during, or after transportation (many
transports did return, often before their term was up).  If it was
said before transportation, that would move the origin across the
Atlantic.  (And if the OED is so foolish as to associate origin only
with the place of first publication, they would assign it to England
regardless.)

Joel

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