Even though the word has been around for over one thousand years, bitch has proven that an old dog can be taught new tricks. Over the centuries, bitch has become a linguistic chameleon with many different meanings and uses. Bitch has become a shape-shifter too, morphing into modern slang spellings like biatch, biznatch, and betch. Bitch is a versatile word. It can behave like a noun, an adjective, a verb, or an interjection, while it also makes a cameo appearance in lots of idioms. Bitch can be a bitch of a word. Calling someone a bitch once seemed to be a pretty straightforward insult, but today – after so many variations, reinventions, and attempts to reclaim the word – it’s not always clear what bitch really means. Nowadays, the word appears in numerous other languages too, from Arabic and Japanese to Spanish and Zulu. This chapter takes a look at bitch in the present day, and beyond.

This chapter recommends that we study silence not merely as the absence of speech but also as the presence of non-speech, thereby featuring discursive absences as manifestations of active avoidance. By highlighting hesitations, the use of euphemisms, the use of effectively elusive generics, and the lexical gaps surrounding default assumptions we habitually take for granted, it offers an introduction to the sociological study of absence.