Dear Reader #4: A (Historically-Accurate) Bitch of a Heat Wave
Hope you’ve been staying cool! These past few days have been sweltering over in Chicago—high 90s Fahrenheit—so I’ve been sweltering and bunkering down with as much ice water as I can muster. You know it’s a real heat wave when all the local restaurants and bars shut down their patios for the day…
Everyone at work was bitching about the absolute sauna that was outside for my entire shift, all ready to start beef with the sun. But tough shit, dear readers; I still had to endure roasting outside in 100-degree weather.
If you’re wondering about those emphasized phrases—why, it’s because while the person currently speaking (er, typing) them is but a weird, history-obsessed lady from the early 21st century, they also wouldn’t at all be out of place for someone in the 1940s! And I know this, because much like everything else I do, I have to obsess over looking up a rough etymology of every single word I type lest I accidentally make my college student in 1945 talk like a valley girl in the eighties.
Now, “bitching” came to me a bit on accident. A few months ago, I was reading Letters from the 442nd, a compilation of letters that Minoru Masuda sent to his wife Hana while serving as a medic for the 442nd Infantry Regiment during WW2. On the 17th of September, 1944, Min described giving vaccinations to soldiers who clearly weren’t in the mood, as made clear by “the usual moans and groans and the threats to the medics and the expected bitching…”(Masuda 85). For a moment, I was stunned by how modern his use of bitching was; that’s a word I’d expect from the mouths of Kids These Days, not a man fighting the Nazis in Italy.
To my delight, bitching is an old sport—older even than Min Masuda. Merriam-Webster sets the date of when “bitch” was first used as a verb as circa 1823; however, it meant to spoil or botch, rather than to complain. That seems to be more of a 1930 usage, at least according to the Online Etymology Dictionary; timelines can get fuzzy with the etymology of slang and foul language. Either way, the past sure was bitching.
Later still, after Germany’s surrender, Masuda grimly informs his wife that, under the current discharge system, he’s not eligible to return home for quite some time, having only 56 out of the required 85 to be discharged. “This,” he writes to Hana, “is commonly called TS in this man’s army”(224). Based on context clues, I can only assume that “TS” is meant to stand for “tough shit”—and, indeed, GIs would have bandied that about!
According to Google trends, the first recorded usage of “tough shit” was in 1937, with slow growth in the forties before taking off in the late sixties. Apparently, it was well-known enough as a phrase that army chaplains regularly issued “tough shit” cards (sometimes bowdlerized to “T.S.,” “tuff stuff,” or “theological solutions”) to chronic complainers as a way to encourage visiting the chaplain and attending services—and, of course, sparing their officers of their bellyaching! (Check out this questionnaire from a soldier—even he knows how backhanded the “T.S.” card is!)
Oh, one last bit of dirty slang that’s older than I thought before I return to revising the last third of Telford; as per Leo Marks’ autobiography Between Silk and Cyanide, it appears that our 1940s friends were already familiar with one of the Internet’s favorite numbers:
…where a major and his lady were locked together in what I believed to be position number 69 in the sexual code-groups. (84)
Nice.
Stay safe out there in the sun, and until next week,
-Noga
Works Cited:
“Bitch, v.” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/bitch. Accessed 30 May 2023.
“Bitch, v. (1, 3).” Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bitch. Accessed 24 August 2023.
Densford, Daryl. “‘Ills, Ails and Wails…’ (TS Cards).” The Chaplain Kit, 10 November 2017, https://thechaplainkit.com/2017/11/10/ills-ails-and-wails/.
“Free Response Answer 07-0299.” The American Soldier in WWII, https://americansoldierww2.org/surveys/a/S99.Q100.F.20726427. Accessed 5 June 2023.
Marks, Leo. Between Silk and Cyanide. Touchstone, 2000.
Masuda, Minoru. Letters from the 442nd, edited by Hana Masuda and Dianne Bridgeman, University of Washington Press, 2008.
“Tough Shit.” Google Books Ngram Viewer, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=tough+shit&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3. Accessed 5 June 2023.
