bastard

   When it occurs as a vocative, ‘bastard’ seldom has its literal meaning of ‘a child born out of wedlock’. It is almost a meaningless noise, expressing contempt for the person addressed. The charge of illegitimacy is in any case hardly an insult to the child concerned. It reproaches the parents, or as Dickens points out in Oliver Twist, the person who uses the word. It is Mr Brownlow who makes that point, when Monks has referred to Oliver as ‘a bastard child’.

   Like all insults, ‘bastard’ can easily be turned into an affectionate term. It needs only to be spoken in the right tone of voice and perhaps with a suitable qualifier. ‘You big horny bastard’ occurs in The Exhibitionist, by Henry Sutton. It is used by a woman to a man and is meant as a compliment, or as the novelist calls it, a ‘thrilling vulgarity’. ‘You rotten bastard’, in I’ll Take Manhattan, by Judith Krantz, is used by a girl to her brother and equated with the fairly mild ‘you beast’.

   Other intimate or friendly uses of the term occur as follows: ‘you poor old bastard’ in Absolute Beginners, by Colin MacInnes; ‘you lovely bastards’, in The Business of Loving, by Godfrey Smith; ‘you handsome bastard’, in Goldfinger, by Ian Fleming; ‘you bloody bastard’, in The Hiding Place, by Robert Shaw, (a novel which also has examples of ‘you bastard’ and ‘you old bastard’ used in a friendly way); ‘you bastard’ and ‘Vou old bastard’, in The Limits of Lord, by Frederic Raphael; ‘you bastard you’, in The River of Diamonds, by Geoffrey Jenkins, where ‘you stupid bastard’ is also friendly; ‘you poor bastard’, in The Spy Who Came in From The Cold, by John le Carré; ‘you cocky bastard’, in Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, by Alan Sillitoe.

   In many of these novels insulting uses of ‘bastard’ also occur. Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, for example, has examples of ‘you bastard’, ‘Vou bastard you’, ‘you dirty bastard’, ‘you lying bastard’, and ‘you sly spine less bastard’ used as seriously intended insults. The instances quoted could easily be multiplied, emphasizing the frequency with which the word is used in one way or another.

   Occasionally a comment by the novelist accompanies it. Thus, in B.S.Johnson’s Travelling People we find: ‘You bluddy [sic] bastard, you ungrateful bluddy bastard.’ Henry noticed that, while he had heard these two expletives used severally and in conjunction with others, oh, many, many times, he could not remember ever having heard them coupled before. This he found mildly interesting.

   As it happens, there is nothing particularly unusual about this collocation. Although ‘bastard’ is, as indicated above, a word that occurs frequently in modern times, there are still those writers and speakers who prefer to side-step it by using a euphemism, such as ‘basket’ or ‘baa-lamb’. ‘You old basket’ occurs, for instance, in both Julia, by H.C. Harwood and A Season In Love, by Peter Draper, in a friendly way. The Half Hunter, by John Sherwood, has ‘you dirty little basket’ used as an insult. This euphemistic use of ‘basket’ appears to have eluded the lexicographers, for it does not appear in a number of dictionaries which have been consulted.