Bitch is a pejorative slang word for a person, usually a woman. When applied to a woman or girl, it means someone who is belligerent, unreasonable, malicious, controlling, aggressive, or dominant. When applied to a man or boy, bitch reverses its meaning and is a derogatory term for being subordinate, weak, or cowardly. In gay speech the word bitch can refer approvingly to a man who is unusually assertive or has the characteristics used pejoratively of a woman.
The slang usage of the word bitch is apparent on the sign in this protest
Literally, a bitch is a female dog; as an insult, it originally compared a woman to a dog in heat
A preserved Consolidated B-24 Liberator at the National Museum of the United States Air Force with nose art titled "Strawberry Bitch" from c. 1942. Airplanes were often painted by American flight crews and named after women, popular characters or slang based on the art in magazines at the time.
Bitch wine. "Bitch" has been reappropriated to have positive meanings in some contexts
In linguistics, reappropriation, reclamation, or resignification is the cultural process by which a group reclaims words or artifacts that were previously used in a way disparaging of that group. It is a specific form of a semantic change. Linguistic reclamation can have wider implications in the fields of discourse and has been described in terms of personal or sociopolitical empowerment.
Claude Monet's Impression, soleil levant was ridiculed as "Impression-ist" in 1872, but the term then became the name of the art movement, "impressionism", and painters began to self-identify as "impressionist".
