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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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I wrote to the owner of this site http://www.pitt.edu/~kloman/vidalframe.html, who suggests that 'bitches' is a dialect form of 'beaches', and that 'snow bitches' would therefore be snow banks.
Bingley
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old hand
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old hand
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> snow banks.
Sounds sensible. Has the bitches/beaches been proven to occur otherwise? I know that while I was in Greece I constantly had to smile at the way the locals said beach - sounds just like bitch.
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stranger
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stranger
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Also, keep in mind that - even without the bitch/beach dialect variation - an 1800's "period novel" talking about snow bitches would merely be referring to canines with a perfectly acceptable turn of phrase, not the human variety you seem to be thinking about.
Last edited by Khyron; 06/06/06 11:57 AM.
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old hand
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old hand
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> an 1800's "period novel" talking about snow bitches would merely be referring to canines..
Really?
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stranger
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stranger
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"Bitch" meaning "female dog" is far from obsolete - it's still very much in use among breeders and hunters, and naturalists use it in reference to female wolves, coyotes, dingoes, foxes, etc.
For female humans I don't like, I generally use "ogress," since the last time an actual ogress was seen around here, there was probably alcohol involved.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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From Partridge's A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English:
bitch. A lewd woman: SE from origin (-1400) to ca. 1660, when it > coll.; since ca. 1837 it has been vulg. rather than coll. (In C. 20 low London it — a fast young woman.) As coll.: e.g., in Arbuthnot's John Bull and Fielding's Tom Jones. --2. Opprobriously of a man: C 16 SE; in C 17-18, coll., as in Hobbes and Fielding. --3. Tea: Cambridge University, ca. 1820-1914. EDD Prob. ex stand bitch. --4. The queen in playing cards, mainly public house; from C 20 James Curtis The Gilt Kid. 1936.
bitch. Go whoring; frequent harlots: from Restoration times to ca. 1830. [...]
[...]
bitch, stand. To preside at tea or perform some other female part: late C 18 - early 19.
No entry for snow bitch.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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old hand
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old hand
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> No entry for snow bitch.
Well quite. I am puzzled as to Khyron's suggestion that the novel referred to dogs.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Bing: I queried another board where some of the participants have extensive libraries, and here's a response from one Ken Greenwald:
Dale, If Mr. Bingley on Wordsmith.org is your source for this quote, you might want to ask him what version of the novel he is referring to and try checking it yourself. I’m sitting here looking at my 1973 copy of Gore Vidal’s Burr – A Novel, ISBN: 0-375-70873-1, and I’m looking on page 380 and it is JUNE, 1835, and there ain’t a SNOW BITCH in sight. Now he might have a different version which could account for the different page numbers. I did scan 20 or so pages before and after, but the difference could be more than that and I missed it. If the quote is accurate, which I have some doubts about - if anything I would guess it said 'snow ditches,' as someone on that sight suggested - why don't you find the title of the section so that you and I can see it for ourselves because, to tell you the truth, I am having a hard time swallowing SNOW BITCH pre-1830s – but one never knows...
...Dale, Don’t give up. Since you have a Wordsmith.org conversation going with Bingley, who provided the quote, why not ask him what version of the book he found it in (publisher, year, ISBN, chapter title) and then this thing can be put to rest one way or the other
Last edited by dalehileman; 06/09/06 04:59 PM.
dalehileman
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As I've lent my copy to someone, and this one has a different cover, I'm not sure if it's the same as mine or not, but according to the search inside function it does have snow bitches: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN...601248-8623024
Bingley
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Carpal Tunnel
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We should also remember that just because an author uses a word or phrase in a historical novel it doesn't mean that that word or phrase was current in the time of the novel.
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