Bitchen, Bitchin’ Slang May Be Older Than You Think

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Holiday and I’m calling from right up the street.

I’m calling from Carlsbad, California.

Oh, well welcome, Holiday. What can we do for you?

Thank you. Well, as a kid, growing up in the 60s, we used the term bitchin’ and I don’t know where that came from.

And how would you use it? Would you be talking about somebody who’s complaining?

No, not at all. It’s about something like something that’s really cool.

-huh.

Yeah, it has nothing to do with dogs or complaining.

No, not at all. And I just can’t figure out where the route might come from.

It’s got to be like surfers flying or something, but how did they come up with that?

So you sound like you grew up in California.

Yeah, I did. I’m a local kid.

Local kid. Carlsbad, good surf town, right?

Right there on the coast, yeah. And so you’ve hit a couple notes here that are really important.

So California is an important one. Surfing is another one. It’s positive is another one. It’s probably not related to dogs.

And how would you spell it?

B-I-T-C-H-E-N.

Okay, that’s cool. Because a lot of people do spell it B-I-T-C-H-E-N.

Some people spell it I-N at the end with an apostrophe.

Right. Because it originally did come from bitching, but we drop off the G because it’s nasalized and you don’t really hear the G, so blah, blah, blah.

So, yeah, dates to around 1957, believe it or not. It does come from a negative meaning.

There’s kind of an inversion of the negative to the positive. And we’ve seen this happen before with words like bad over the 80s where bad started to mean good.

And wicked. Same thing happened with wicked, the Boston wicked.

Sick and ill. Sick and ill.

Yeah, exactly. And so originally when it was negative, when bitching was negative around the 1920s, it was used for emphasis.

A bitchin’ fool or this bitchin’ car. You just say just like meaning terrible or awful or just bad.

And then that force stayed behind, the force of your anger, the force of your passion, the force of the emotion, but the negativity went away.

And what was replaced was the positivity. So now you could say this bitchin’ car, this bitchin’ Camaro was a well-known song, by the way, and you meant a good car, a good Camaro, right?

This bitchin’ surfboard meant a great surfboard. This bitchin’ surf meant a good surf, right?

-huh.

Yeah. And interestingly enough, you’re going to love this, I think.

The first use that we know of was a Gidget book. Do you remember Gidget?

Of course. Oh my goodness. Yeah, and the Gidget movies, these were fairly wholesome things, right?

Yeah. So the first, 1957, Gidget was the first use that we know of in print.

And it did definitely have a surfing connection.

Well, all right. Well, thank you. That is interesting. I wouldn’t have figured that out.

I was trying to figure out Latin roots and all sorts of stuff like that.

No, not at all. Sometimes the simplest answer.

Yeah. All right. Yeah. Cool. Cool.

Catch you.

Yes. Thanks, Holiday.

Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Sure. Take care.

Yeah. Good talking with you. Bye.

Thank you very much. Have a good day.

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