Word of the Day: rixatrix

rixatrix (n)

A quarrelsome, scolding woman; a bitch.

"One of the more popular methods of teaching a communis rixatrix... to hold her tongue was by giving her a good ducking in the local lake or mill pond."
--Daniel Diehl, Mark P. Donnelly, The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History

A rixatrix may be tough to deal with in real life (and I've met a few), but they do make for compelling characters in film and literature. Just think about The Taming of the Shrew, an entire play built around a verbal blitzkreig between a loquacious bitch and a multiloquent.... (What is the male equivalent of a bitch? A bastard?)

In Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, one of my favorite plays (and also an excellent Dick-and-Liz movie), the two main characters, George and Martha, have a Taming of the Shrew-type verbal battle that's as thrilling as Shakespeare's -- or more so, now, since the cruise missiles fly in the modern vernacular. I even wrote a paper about the play in college. Or a few papers, if I recall. It can be analyzed from several angles: Freudian, rhetorical, dramatic, even political: George and Martha...hmmm.

Tell the scold in your life (male or female) to "stop being such a rixatrix", and see what kind of reaction you get. My guess is that it will stop the castigation cold -- at least until he or she finds a dictionary.