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I came across this saying "karma is a bitch" a few times while reading some comments online recently. I understand karma as a religious concept to mean "what goes around, comes around". I also understand that bitch is a derogatory word for insulting a woman.

Why is karma being referred to as a bitch? Is this a new interpretation on what karma is about?

Sven Yargs
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Question Overflow
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Also used as the rhetorical question

Ain't karma a bitch?

Synonyms:

  • What goes around, comes around
  • Getting his just desserts
  • He had it coming

and strongly related to

  • Payback's a bitch

It is likely a mix of having bad Karma and the idiom Payback's a bitch, where Payback is performed by someone wronged by the now punished person, but Karma just happened to the person for some seemingly righteous reason not necessarily related to a person or physical entity.

The bitch part is personifying the concept Karma, which is claimed to have doled out the resulting punishment. In this case Karma is being unpleasantly harsh.

It is a taunt aimed at people who are supposedly asking for the situation they are in, due to their previous actions.

So the person saying it, considers the one they say it to or about, deserves to be punished because of something they did.

For example: someone is so busy pointing and laughing at a person who had an accident, that they walk straight into a lamp post and break their nose. A spectator who did not find the accident they saw funny, could say "Ain't Karma a bitch?"

mplungjan
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    Then shouldn't karma be praised instead of cursed because the person getting punished is getting his just desserts? – Question Overflow Jul 31 '13 at 08:22
  • Please see update. – mplungjan Jul 31 '13 at 08:47
  • Payback's a bitch. So is life. – J.R. Jul 31 '13 at 21:08
  • @Tonepoet I agree now I re-read it. I have changed the wording. Please feel free to comment. – mplungjan Jul 25 '15 at 20:36
  • I do have a minor point of contention: The bitch remark is semantically being aimed at the karma, since it is the proverbial actor doling out retribution. In this case, the recipient of the punishment is being asked what he thinks of the divine force that is directly causing him suffering. Just to make a long story short, let's put it this way: If a woman hit your head with a hammer, which one should you usually call the bitch? A) Your split skull; B) The hammer; or C) The woman. (The genuine answer is probably is D) "Dead men tell no tales" but nevertheless, I think I have made my point.) – Tonepoet Jul 25 '15 at 20:37
  • Oh, heh, Sorry for the double post but I deleted my comment to fix some typos, due to the five minute limit and it seems you posted your response in the time it took to copy & paste. Come to think of it, I do think that the originating statement, "payback" is interpreted in a similar way, since the sentence has no other subject to refer to but now the answer is a sound explanation to the question. I'll grant my positive vote now. – – Tonepoet Jul 25 '15 at 21:31
  • The idea that you should always receive retribution for your transgressions is often a harsh one, especially if you act out of ignorance, impetuosity, addiction, etc; in Christian culture there is the concept of mercy, where you are forgiven your transgressions. rather than receiving payback. In comparison to mercy, karma is certainly a bitch. – Stuart F Sep 13 '23 at 08:58
  • While calling something a "bitch" originally implied a personification (by way of a doggification?), the phrase "it's a bitch" has since been frequently applied more generally to unpleasant situations, with no implication of those situations having human characteristics or a mind and will of their own. See the lyrics of Hall and Oates' "Rich Girl" (released in 1977) for instance. Whether personification is intended in the specific case of karma and/or payback is debatable. – Doug Warren Sep 13 '23 at 18:57
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There's another meaning of bitch that should clear this up. From NOAD:

bitch (noun)
1 a female dog, wolf, fox, or otter.
2 informal derogatory a woman whom one dislikes or considers to be malicious or unpleasant.
• [in sing. ] informal a thing or situation that is unpleasant or difficult to deal with : the stove is a bitch to fix.

So, in the phrase karma is a bitch, the writer means:

"When what goes around comes around, the situation can be difficult to deal with or fix."

It might be worth noting that Collins marks this use of the word as slang, while Macmillan labels it as very informal.

J.R.
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Charles Doyle, Wolfgang Mieder & Fred Shapiro, The [Yale] Dictionary of Modern Proverbs (2012) gives a first occurrence date for "Karma is a bitch" of 1995, suggesting that this saying is very young:

Karma is a bitch.

1995 Hollywood Reporter 7 Aug.: "Hello? Hello? HELLO? Nobody answers ... Did somebody say Tommy on line 2? Karma is a bitch" (ellipsis dots and capitalization as shown). ... Cf. "PAYBACK is a bitch" and "LIFE is a bitch."

In the Dictionary of Modern Proverbs, "Payback is a bitch" has a first cited occurrence from 1970, and "Life is a bitch" has a first cited occurrence from 1940 (and subsequent variations "Life is a bitch and then you die" [1982] and "Life is a bitch and then you marry one" [1987]). It's unclear whether "Payback is a bitch" is an outgrowth of "Life is a bitch," but I think it's likely, given the similarity in their focus on retribution, that "Karma is a bitch" is a mutation of "Payback is a bitch."

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Sven Yargs
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  • In his unpublished first draft, Hobbes had "Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and a bitch." – TimR Sep 13 '23 at 09:48