Bastard (pronounced bas-terd, br-sted, or bar-stad)
(1) A
person born of unmarried parents; an illegitimate child (technically gender-neutral
but historically applied almost exclusively to males). Use is now mostly in a historic context.
(2) In
slang as a term of disparagement, a vicious, despicable, or thoroughly disliked
person.
(3) In
slang, an expression of sympathy for a man who has suffered in some way
(unlucky bastard, poor bastard etc).
(4) In
slang, an expression used of someone who has been fortunate (lucky bastard).
(5) In jocular
slang, a term of endearment (chiefly Australia & New Zealand).
(6) Something
fake, phony, irregular, inferior, spurious, or unusual; of abnormal or
irregular shape; of unusual make or proportions (now rare).
(7) In
engineering, politics, architecture etc, something which is a mixture of inputs
as opposed to pure versions.
(8) In
metalworking & woodworking, a type of file.
(9) In
informal use an extremely difficult or unpleasant job or task.
(10) In
animal breeding, a mongrel (biological cross between different breeds, groups
or varieties) (now rare).
(11) A
sword midway in length between a short-sword and a long sword.
(12) In
sugar refining, (1) an inferior quality of soft brown sugar, obtained from
syrups that have been boiled several times or (2) a large mold for straining
sugar.
(13) A
very sweet fortified wine, often with spices added.
(14) In
commercial printing, paper not of a standard size.
(15) In
theater lighting, one predominant color blended with small amounts of
complementary color; used to replicate natural light because of their warmer
appearance.
(16) In
theology, a heretic or sinner; one separated from one's deity (archaic).
(17) In
biology, a botanical tendril or offshoot (rare and used only in the technical
literature).
(18) In
linguistics, any change or neologism in language that is viewed as a
degradation.
1250–1300:
From the Middle English bastarde,
basterd & bastart, from
the Anglo-Norman bastard (illegitimate
child), from the eleventh century Medieval Latin bastardus of unknown origin but perhaps from the Germanic
(Ingvaeonic) bāst- (related to the
Middle Dutch bast (lust, heat)), a presumed
variant of bōst- (marriage) + the derogatory Old French –ard (the pejorative
agent noun suffix), taken as signifying the offspring of a polygynous marriage
to a woman of lower status (ie the acknowledged child of a nobleman by a woman
other than his wife), a pagan Germanic custom not sanctioned by the Christian church. The Old Frisian boask, boaste & bost (marriage) was from the proto-Germanic
bandstu- & banstuz (bond, tie), a noun derivative of the Indo-European bhendh (to tie, bind). It was cognate with the French bâtard (bastard), the West Frisian bastert (bastard), the
Dutch bastaard (bastard), the German Bastard (bastard) and the Icelandic bastarður (bastard). Etymologists caution that charming as it is, the
traditional explanation of Old French bastard as derivative of fils de bast (literally
“child of a packsaddle”, the source of this the idea of a child conceived on an
improvised bed (medieval saddles often doubled as beds while traveling)) is
dubious on chronological and geographical grounds. The Medieval Latin Bastum (packsaddle) is of uncertain origin.
In
pre-modern Europe, being born to unmarried parents was not always regarded as a
stigma although the Church in canon law prohibited bastards from holding clerical
office without an explicit papal indult.
Royalty and the aristocracy, famously prolific in the production of
bastards, seemed often unconcerned, Norman duke William, the Conqueror of
England, is referred to in state documents as "William the Bastard"
and one Burgundian prince was even officially styled “Great Bastard of Burgundy”. From this, came the idea of something
bastardized being associated with the creation of an inferior copy or version
of something, hence the sense of corruption, degradation or debasement, hence
the association with words like counterfeit, fake, imperfect, irregular,
mongrel, phony, sham, adulterated, baseborn, false, impure, misbegotten, mixed
& spurious, the adjectival form common by the late fourteenth century. However, the word eventually became used to
describe things deliberately designed to be variations of something, typically
between two established types. Thus
emerged bastard agrimony, the bastard alkanet, bastard bar, bastard hartebeest,
bastard file, bastard hemp, bastard hogberry, bastard pennyroyal, bastard
pimpernel, bastard quiver tree, bastard tallow-wood, bastard tamarind, bastard
teak, bastard musket, bastard culverin, bastard gemsbok, bastard mahogany, bastard
toadflax, bastard trumpeter, bastard cut, bastard eigne & bastard amber.
Variations of the word existed in many languages including the Scots bastart & bastert, the French bâtard, the Old French bastardus, the Galician bastardo, the Middle Dutch bastaert, the Dutch bastaard, the Italian bastardo, the Late Latin bastardus, the Indonesian bastar, the Saramaccan bása, the Sranan Tongo basra, the Middle English bastard, bastarde, basterd & bastart. Use as a generic vulgar term of abuse for a man appears to date from circa 1830 although presumably it may have be slanderously applied in the past. The early fourteenth century noun bastardy (condition of illegitimacy) was from the Anglo-French and Old French bastardie and appears from the 1570s in contemporary documents in the sense of "begetting of bastards, fornication". The early seventeenth century verb bastardize meant "to identify as a bastard", predated by the figurative sense, "to make degenerate, debase" which dates from the 1580s, probably because bastard since the 1540s had also served as a verb meaning "to declare illegitimate". The later use of bastardize, bastardized, bastardizing & bastardization to mean “rituals and activities involving harassment, abuse or humiliation as a way of initiating a person into a group or organization” was associated with the military, crime gangs and university fraternities, (ie structures where the membership is predominately made up of males aged 17-25. The terms hazing, initiation, ragging & deposition were synonymous and all began as regionally-specific but soon tended towards the internationalism which marks modern English. The once useful phrase “political bastardry” is still seen but is now rare, a victim of association; as children born out of wedlock are now no longer described as bastards, the word is also being banished from some other contexts, including political discourse which is also losing many gender-loaded expressions.
Notable bastards include Confucius (circa 551-479 BC), William the Conqueror (circa 1028-1087), Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Thomas Paine (1737-1809), Lawrence of Arabia (1888-1935), John Gorton (1911-2002), Eva Peron (1919-1952), Fidel Castro (1926-2016) & Marilyn Monroe.
The bastard file.
A
bastard file is a half-round file. It gained
the name from being rendered with an intermediate cut, neither very coarse nor
very fine and was thus neither one thing nor the other; it was something impure.
The
concept of things in engineering, architecture, literature et al being thought
bastardized versions if in any way hybrids or deviations from established forms
can apply also to proper nouns. Bob
Cunis (1941-2008) was a New Zealand cricketer described as a “medium pace
bowler” which may have been generous and he extracted little movement from the
ball and certainly wasn’t a spinner.
Still, between 1964-1972 he played twenty tests and coached the national
side for three seasons in the late 1980s.
His contribution to linguistic amusement came when BBC Radio commentator
John Arlott (1914-1991), unimpressed by the bowler’s pedestrian deliveries commented:
“Cunis, a funny sort of name, like his
bowling, neither one thing nor the other." It passed into the sporting annals but may
have be plagiarized, apparently appearing in an earlier newspaper report on a
match the tourists played against a county side and Winston Churchill (1875--1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) had sometime before 1952 used the line after learning the name of a member of parliament was Alfred Bossom (1881–1965).
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