The Inherent Bastard
March 29, 2024
The word “bastard” has been a saddle pack, an illegitimate child, an easy way to curse without using vulgar language, and much more over the course of its complicated linguistic evolutionary history. Beside all of those definitions, the word is much more meaningful and filled with social implications and issues. From being used as a legal loophole, a way for Middle-Age middle-aged lawyers to bring down the monarchy’s inheritants, to abash the baseborn children of the English-speaking world, and to argue against cultural diffusion, bastardy exhibits a general trend of lowering the state of a thing, person, or action. Therefore, in its most historically applicative form, bastardy is a debased state of existence where one’s own inherent traits are used to bring them down.
The English version of the word “bastard” originates from the Old French “bastard,” which in turn comes from the medieval Latin term “bastardus,” denoting something impure or spurious. The Latin variant likely stems from “bastum,” Latin for “packsaddle,” as that is where most bastards were commonly thought of as being conceived. In Middle-Age Western Europe, especially in England and France, bastards were known as the sons and daughters born out of wedlock and then acknowledged as such by their parents of royalty and nobility. Before the early thirteenth century, these children were not devout of any inheritance or, as a consequence of their royal lineage, socioeconomic advantage within their environment.
A well-known example of such a structure can be seen in William the Conqueror’s success in overpowering both Normandy and England and ruling over them. In legal documentation, he was named William the Bastard, as he was born to the Duke of Normandy and a peasant woman, Herleva (Collins). Bastardy was not a rare occurrence within the royal sphere of family and influence. When kings, princes, and noblemen would trek long distances for diplomatic or war-waging reasons, they would often leave their royal or noble wives back home in their palaces to represent their presence while away on duty. To keep company and to release stress, the traveling royalty or noblemen would employ the local prostitutes or peasant women who would subsequently bear their children, as reliable physical contraception was both nonexistent and, under the then both legal and moral Catholic doctrine, condemned (English Standard Version, Genesis 1.28). These hierarchal hybrid offspring were legally labeled “bastards” in English and French, as there, the Old French “fils de bast,” meaning “packsaddle son,” or, a child conceived on an improvised bed, seemed to point towards an appropriate explanation of where the children came from (Online Etymology Dictionary).
In the beginning of the thirteenth century, the word, which was not yet an insult, experienced a shift from being a simple distinction of heritage to a negatively connotated legal term and label. This new stigmatized meaning came from the bastard children being legally excluded from royal succession on the grounds of their illegitimate birth when competing parties, in their quests to unseat or argue their legitimacy for the positions the bastards held, used plaintiffs that justified their reasoning with the Church’s doctrine, in which case the plaintiffs usually won as the doctrine was, at the time, closely intertwined with the legal system (Collins). From then on, royal or noble children born out of wedlock widely lost their inherited advantages, such as having a royal or noble title and high social standing. The word “bastard” and its bearers subsequently took on a more stigmatized, taboo, and peasant-equivalent significance, bringing the word one step closer to its modern negative connotation.
The modern mild pejorative noun “bastard” has been in use as an insult since the word’s thirteenth-century shift from being a title of identification of a certain birth status to that status bearing shame, heresy, and impracticality. As the stigma regarding a couple having children without being married fell out of favor with the dissipation of the direct influence of Catholic marriage law on social structures, Western societies generally grew more liberal and skeptical of the Catholic Church as a consequence of the Enlightenment, only the word remained as bearing offense, regardless of whether its original meaning was applicable as the denotative core of the insult (Collins).
However, both the archaic and the modern vulgar meanings of the word “bastard” - an unpleasant or lowly person - are in and of themselves despicable. In its shift toward being used as an insult that does not pack its original meaning with the offense, the inherent impudent essence of the word has not completely left its significance, rather, it has been projected to the forefront of the insult. This points to the teller of the insult as someone who looks down upon another and attempts to insult them by using something they were born into and therefore can do nothing about. This, while abstract enough to separate itself from the archaic label and its dictionary definition, but impactful and historically significant enough to resist change or its replacement, delves into the nature of an obscenity’s evolution throughout its numerous centuries’ worth of repetition. Beginning with social stigma and the quality of calling on someone’s existence as being the product of a historically shameful act, the word easily abandoned the common denotation as time changed toward the more progressive, but as a verbal injury, the core of “bastard,” is not in its meaning, but in its intended, painful, and intrinsic personal implications.
As a verb (to bastardize) and as an adjective (bastard color, bastard language, etc.), the usage of the word exclusively calls on the aspects of illegitimacy and false nature of the original born out-of-wedlock children and applies those qualities to a wider range of things, actions, or processes by labeling them as lesser than their purer, less tainted counterparts. To “bastardize” a language, an activity, or even a wine, does not only mean to bring the object down to a lesser level, but to also label it as illegitimate and inferior to an already-existing superior counterpart. By “bastardizing,” one is introducing corrupted, impure elements to that object and mongrelizing it. In this definition, the bastard version of something is not a product of a successful synthesis of two or more elements or a “new” and more diffused, diverse version of its original self. Bastardizing is not a positive evolution for something, but rather a lessening of its original, pure qualities by intermingling them with unwelcome and “lower” parts.
This becomes problematic when bastardizing is done unintentionally as a consequence of a historical circumstance, such as in the case of the often-labeled as such and very much misunderstood “bastard English,” Jamaican Patois, where the language and its speakers have needed to fight for legitimacy, recognition, and application in a written form, to replace the unfamiliarity of standard British English and its separation from the popular spoken language in Jamaica: Patois (Belcher-Timme). The “bastardization” of the language originated in the circumstance of slavery in the Caribbean where, as a consequence, “we see that Jamaicans today speak a hybrid language […] that was born when African slaves learned English and filtered it through the languages they had been born to” (McWhorter 15). In this case, the tongue was formed under special, oppressive circumstances, and not as an intentional degradation of British English. Yet Patois is still not recognized as a separate language, giving it the characteristic illegitimacy-bearing label of “bastard.” By popular demand, Patois needs to be kept alive and eventually needs to be recognized as its language. However, this recognition is extremely difficult to reach as Patois’ inherent informal and scattered, varying from place to place, nature prevents it from organizing into a single written form such as a universal dictionary or an official set of grammatical rules. The travesty of the state of the bastard form lies in its inescapable characteristic of being received as a belittled and impure version of the original, leading to a neverending quest for legitimacy that remains unresolved as a direct result of its inherent disorder.
By lowering the state of being of a person, object, or action by labeling them “bastards,” or “bastardizing” them, those who want to bring down an institution, or person or solidify their positions succeed by exposing the taboo social nature of the state of bastardy. By taking advantage of the fixed, predetermined states of existence of the “bastards,” which include inheritance, abuse targets, or entire languages, the label makers, who are the lawyers, sadistic children, and governments, tarnish the already-present legitimacy in their victims by bringing up their circumstances in an ad-hominem fashion. Then, by way of justifying their case with their victims’ inadvertent, inherent conditions, they gain an advantage and win over those whom they subsequently name bastards. That way, the bastard remains in his or her perpetual state of illegitimacy. Bastardy is therefore the constant state of being beaten down by way of one’s immanent conditions being used to justify their debasement.
Works Cited
Holy Bible: English Standard Version. English Standard Version ed., Crossway Bibles, 2001.
“Bastard.” English Oxford Living Dictionaries, Oxford Univeristy Press, 2018, en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/bastard.
Belcher-Timme, Paxton. “Patois: the Language of Jamaica.” Debate Central, University of Vermont, 1 Dec. 2009, debate.uvm.edu/dreadlibrary/Belcher-Timme.htm.
Collins, Sarah. “The Strange History of the ‘Bastard’ in Medieval Europe.” The Wire, The Wire, 18 June 2017, thewire.in/history/history-bastard-europe.
McWhorter, John H. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. Avery, an Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2009.