witch

   There is a big difference in modern usage between ‘you witch’, said to a young woman, and ‘you old witch’ said to an older woman. The former term is complimentary, meaning that the person concerned is bewitching in appearance. The latter term shows ‘old’ being used to mean ‘elderly’, and not as a word expressing affection.

   ‘Witch’ in this case is the equivalent of ‘hag’ or ‘ugly woman’. Lord Lytton said that he ‘found every woman a witch’, an ambiguous statement. He presumably meant that he found every woman bewitching.

   This friendly, admiring use of the term occurs in Laura, by Vera Caspary: ‘Your name, witch, is sizzling on all the wires in the country.’ The Oxford English Dictionary dates this usage from the eighteenth century only, but the following passage from The Witch of Edmonton (1623), by Rowley, Dekker, and Ford, is relevant:

   Just: Why laugh you?

   Mother Sawyer: At my name, The brave name this knight gives me: ‘witch.’

   Just: Is the name of witch so pleasing to thine ear?

   Mother Sawyer: A witch? Who is not? Hold not that universal name in scorn then. What are your painted things in princes’ courts.

   Upon whose eyelids lust sits, blowing fires To burn men’s souls in sensual, hot desires, Upon whose naked paps a lecher’s thought Acts sin in fouler shape than can be wrought?

   Just: But those work not as you do.

   Mother Sawyer: No, but far worse.

   These by enchantments can whole lordships change.

   To trunks of rich attire…

   Are not these witches?

   Just: Yes, yes, but the law

   Casts not an eye on these.

   Mother Sawyer: Why, then, on me, Or any lean old beldam? Reverence once Had wont to wait on age; now an old woman Ill favour’d grown with years, if she be poor Must be call’d bawd or witch.

   The vocative uses in the Shakespeare plays of ‘witch’ are all insulting. Shakespeare usually describes a witch as a hag or quean, describing her as foul and ugly, wrinkled, monstrous. In The Merry Wives of Windsor (4:ii) is the famous scene where Falstaff dresses as an old woman in order to escape the attentions of a jealous husband. He is beaten nevertheless as the husband says: ‘Out of my door, you witch, you hag, you baggage, you polecat, you ronyon! Out! Out!’ ‘Witch’ is addressed knowingly to a man in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, as it could be in former times. In Old English ‘witch’ had both masculine and feminine forms. The application of the word to a man continued in some English dialects until the present century.