whoreson

   The son of a whore would inevitably have been illegitimate, so ‘whoreson’ is a synonym for ‘bastard’. It was used as a term of contempt mainly until the seventeenth century, e.g. in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour, where Stephano calls a servant ‘Whoreson, base fellow’. He is admonished by his cousin for using such ‘unseason’d rude comparatives’. But ‘whoreson’ was sometimes used between intimates in a fairly friendly way, rather as ‘bastard’ is used in modern times.

   In either its abusive sense, or as almost a disguised compliment, it could become an element in a vocative group. ‘Ah, you whoreson little valiant villain, you!’ occurs in Shakespeare’s Henry the Fourth Part Two. It is possible to find literary occurrences of ‘whoreson’ after the seventeenth century, but one suspects that the authors concerned are well steeped in Shakespeare and his contemporaries and are preserving usage that was no longer current. Keats, for example, uses ‘whoreson’ as an adjective, but that poet’s vocabulary, when writing, certainly reflected Shakespeare more than nineteenth-century colloquial speech.