Tut-tut, It's A Duke's Life <p>tut-tut, It's A Duke's Life

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday June 22, 2002

Ruth Wajnryb

A friend was talking about a recent newspaper spread on Philip, aka, the Queen's consort, Mr Mountbatten, of royal German and Greek lineage, before he became Mr Windsor, the Duke of Disappointment. It was a less-than-flattering probe of an unsympathetic dilettante who graduated from penniless aristo-layabout to royal consort-layabout, burdened by a job description that didn't extend beyond sperm provider.

My friend said: ``It's hard to know whether to think `Poor bastard!' or `You bastard!"'

I stopped in my tracks. Here in a nutshell was a perfect illustration of both the flexibility and the limitations of ``bastard".

So-called ``bad words", according to linguist Geffrey Hughes, may be classified into eight possible categories. The more emotional the word, the more grammatically flexible it is. ``Fuck", for instance, fits into all eight, some examples being ``You fuck!" (talking to someone) and ``to fuck about" (multipurpose verb).

Measured by the same taxonomic gauge, ``bastard" offers only two uses: talking to (as in ``You bastard!") and talking about (``Poor bastard") . It's been suggested to me that a long first syllable (b-a-a-a-stard) heightens the invective. The other possible category at a stretch is adjectival: ``the bastard banks" or ``a bastard act". Certainly, ``bastard" never reaches the inventiveness of ``mother-fucker" or the grammatically reflexive, if physically implausible, ``go fuck yourself".

Of course, ``bastard" used to mean illegitimate in birth/born out of wedlock, but you'd be hard-pressed today to find anyone under 70 using it in that sense. Now that society hardly distinguishes between in/out of wedlock, and now that we have DNA to support or refute paternity, there's no need for ``bastard" as a measure of social or legal status. In fact, the British journalist Katherine Whitehorn lamented that more politicians were not ``bastards by birth instead of vocation".

However, it has other uses and certainly the etymology has left a mostly negative stamp. When ``bastard" means ``bad" (which is not all the time, see further below), it remains unequivocally bad. ``Murdering bastards" screamed the British tabloids following the 1979 assassination of Lord Louis Mountbatten. Asked why he left his wife for another woman, Hemingway said, ``Because I am a bastard."

Yet hard-core badness notwithstanding, ``bastard" mostly retains a sense of something lacking approval. Dictionary glosses are awash with the lingering tut-tut of illegitimacy: something irregular, inferior, spurious, unusual, unpleasant, false, resembling in appearance but not quite the real thing.

From this point, it's not a big leap to an expression of pity. ``The poor bastard! What a life! Never had a chance!" Here ``bastard" is not so much bad, wrong or off-centre, as worthy of our pity or compassion. And once these emotions are evoked, envy is not far away ``You lucky bastard!"

From there, we move comfortably to affection. The Macquarie Dictionary tells us that bastard, like ``bugger", may be affectionate or offensive, depending on the speaker's intentions.

There's comfort for Philip in that the one meaning of ``bastard" never used of him is that which questions the legitimacy of his birth. Yes, he's worthy of some pity for a wasted life. Yes, he's the object of contempt for the cruelty of his ways. But in terms of connections, he's unequivocally royal. Poor bastard.

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