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Archiver > GENBRIT > 2004-05 > 1084178628


From: "Roy Stockdill" <>
Subject: Re: OT: A Capital Hash (and none of us are yet amused)
Date: Mon, 10 May 2004 09:55:29 +0000
In-Reply-To: <amOZ4bU4pqnAFwD2@blueyonder.co.uk>


> From: Brian Pears <>

> Roy Stockdill <> writes
> >Surely the Marshall Aid was to help pay for all those little bastards the GIs left
> >over here?
>
> With a better choice of words that could have been funny, and my
> late friend, Jean, one of the little b....s you refer to, would
> have enjoyed the joke. I think you've forgotten that you aren't
> writing for the News of the Screws any longer.>

Bastard is a word frequently used by genealogists - both in this
group and many others and very regularly in print - to describe
someone who is illegitimate.

Speaking as one myself (my father was still married to, but separated
from, his first wife when I was born and he and my mother were not
free to marry until some 18 months later), I see nothing wrong with
it.

I have no quarrel with the official definition of the word, as found
in all sensible dictionaries, in its true original meaning of
illegitimate, a natural child born to two people not married to one
another. That it should have a relatively modern and secondary, slang
meaning to describe an unpleasant person and may be regarded as
offensive by some puritanical souls is a problem for them, not me.

We are historians here, are we not, and surely as such we use
the words we need to describe something in its original meaning?

Roy Stockdill
Web page of the Guild of One-Name Studies:- www.one-name.org
Newbies' Guide to Genealogy & Family History:- www.genuki.org.uk/gs/Newbie.html

One would be in less danger
From the wiles of the stranger
If one's own kin and kith
Were more fun to be with

Ogden Nash

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