Word: bitche
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Mississippi drawl of Senator Eastland spread through the committee room. Said Eastland to Baldwin, using no initials: "You goddam son of a bitch...
This skein is thoroughly tangled from the moment Character Wylie comes down to lunch brooding about cancer and finds the botanist's wife, name of Yvonne, who is brooding over Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Wylie quickly recognizes her as "a nice bitch . . . with a father complex" and wins her sympathy by telling her what unkind reviews TIME gives his books. Yvonne tells Wylie all about her experience in the conservatory...
...soon finds out, when the Goddess herself appears in the form of an unscrupulous female named Erica-a "triple-faced, ash-blonde bitch" with whom Poet Venn-Thomas had had a gruesome love affair in the Late Christian Epoch. What Erica does to overcivilized New Crete is something awful. She plants some 20th Century cigarettes in the closet of a cute little nymph named Sapphire; she fouls up the witches, hexes the horses, mortifies the magicians. By the time she's through, New Crete is on the verge of collapse-at which point Poet Venn-Thomas sensibly decides...
...long seemed to be all right-even profitable-to use much gamier words, including blasphemy and obscenity, in U.S. novels. "Son-of-a-bitch" had quite a literary past, going back at least to Shakespeare (in King Lear). Owen Wister sounded it more discreetly in The Virginian (1902), where it was cloaked as "son-of-a -." The Virginian's ringing retort was well remembered: "When you call me that, smile." The only question was: Was it quite the proper phrase for the President to use in public, with or without smiling...
...doctrine of one hardy expert on the burning word, the President had not been daring at all, but unforgivably commonplace and unimaginative. In The American Language, H. L. Mencken complained: "Our maid-of-all-work in [the profanity] department is son-of-a-bitch, which seems as pale and ineffectual to a Slav or a Latin as fudge does to us. There is simply no lift in it, no shock, no sis-boom-ah . . . Put the second person pronoun and the adjective old in front of it and scarcely enough bounce is left in it to shake up an archdeacon...