Diary (August 2, 2020)
Online diary of Karl Jones for Sunday August 2, 2020.
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Diary
Bastard
Mark Jacobs - Well spoken — your arrow flies swift and mostly true to the target, only slightly marred a touch of ad hominem fallacy, but over a sharp statement.
One particular word does me a personal injury, your barb rasping a raw nerve which runs deeper than childhood —
I could do without the misogynist slur "bastards", which originates in the sin of a woman being unmarried at the time she gives birth to a child.
The idiom is what it is, carrying scant modern connotation of its despicable origin, save for a few cases such as mine, where my mother found it necessary to have a contractual husband for a period of time, a month perhaps, beginning just before my birth and running for the contracted period of time, establishing a legal father on my birth certificate, that mother and I and family and all Humanity not suffer the shame of my biological sire having abandoned his pregnant teenage lover.
That's how they did it, as recently as 1960.
So, don't care to read the word "bastard". But as I say, it's a common idiom, no shame attaches beyond my usual "ad hominem fallacy" complaint.