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, its flight only slightly impaired by ad hominem fallacy.
Ah, but what special ad hominem is the misogynist slur "bastard", which originates in the sin of a woman being unmarried at the time she gives birth to a child.
It causes me personal pain, your bastard barb, rasping that raw nerve which runs deeper than childhood.
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 abandoning his pregnant teenage lover.
That was how they did it, as recently as 1960.
So, you will understand that my ambitions in life include not read the word "bastard". Perhaps if I bare my shame in this way, people will stop using the word, or at least feel dirty about themselves for using it.
But as I say, it is a common idiom, and no special shame attaches beyond my usual "ad hominem fallacy" complaint.