bastard – English noun declension

English noun forms of bastard

Noun: bastard
Singularbastard
Pluralbastards

Sample Sentences

  • Jarrod: Who are you?
  • Heath: Your father’s bastard son. [1965, The Big Valley:]
  • Some bastard stole my car while I was helping an injured person.
  • You sick bastard!
  • Don't be such a bastard already!
  • I assume that bastard won't be seen again.
  • “Oh my God, they killed Kenny!” “You bastards!” [1997, South Park television program]
  • lucky bastard
  • funny bastard
  • Get over here, you old bastard!
  • Poor bastard, I feel so sorry for him.
  • These poor bastards started out life probably in bad or broken homes.
  • Life can be a real bastard.
  • The architecture was a kind of bastard, suggesting Gothic but not being true Gothic.
  • There were also made good and politic laws that parliament, against usury, which is the bastard use of money... [1622, Francis Bacon, Bacon's History of the Reign of King Henry VII, Cambridge University Press, published 1902, page 62:]
  • […] we ſhall haue all the world drinke browne & white baſtard. [c. 1603–1604 (date written), William Shakespeare, “Measure for Measure”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene ii], page 72, column 2:]
  • If you are a politician, you make sure that you know all such references in case an interviewer suddenly asks, 'Are you one of the bastards in Mr Major's cabinet?' [2000, Peter Hobday, Managing the message, Allison & Busby:]
  • While John Major managed to get the Maastricht Treaty through parliament, despite the efforts of the “bastards” in his cabinet, the 2001 Conservative General Election campaign was fought on entirely eurosceptic lines. [2011, Duncan Hall, A2 Government and Politics: Ideologies and Ideologies in Action, Lulu.com, →ISBN, page 62:]
  • In the UK, Conservative Maastricht rebels (the 'bastards') almost brought down Conservative Prime Minister John Major's government. [2014 September 23, Stanley Johnson, Stanley, I Resume: Further recollections of an exuberant life, Biteback Publishing, →ISBN:]
  • One “bastard,” the Minister for Wales, John Redwood (who mounted an unsuccessful campaign to displace the Tory chief, John Major), was removed in a Cabinet reshuffle; but was his young successor William Hague any more reliable? [2014, Melvin J. Lasky, Profanity, Obscenity and the Media, Transaction Publishers, →ISBN:]
  • But there is no doubt that the “bastards,” who had tormented so many Tory leaders over the years, had won. The longed-for break with “Europe” had finally come, but at the same price that Americans paid for Trump's takeover of the Republican Party. [2020 September 3, Ian Buruma, The Churchill Complex: The Rise and Fall of the Special Relationship from Winston and FDR to Trump and Johnson, Atlantic Books, →ISBN:]

Etymology

1. From Middle English bastard, bastarde, from Old English bastard (used as an epithet), from Anglo-Norman bastard, Old French bastart (“illegitimate child”), perhaps via Medieval Latin bastardus, of obscure origin.
2. Likely from Frankish *bāst (“marriage, relationship”) + Old French -ard, -art (pejorative suffix denoting a specific quality or condition). Frankish *bāst derives from a North Sea Germanic variety of Proto-Germanic *banstuz (“bond, connection, relationship, marriage with a second woman of lower status”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰendʰ- (“to tie, bind”) and is related to West Frisian boaste (“marriage, matrimony”), Middle Dutch bast (“lust, heat”), and more distantly to English boose (“cow-stall”). The term probably originally referred to a child from a polygynous marriage of heathen Germanic custom — a practice not sanctioned by the Christian churches.
3. Alternatively, and less likely, Old French bastart may have originated from the Old French term fils de bast (“packsaddle son”), meaning a child conceived on an improvised bed (medieval saddles often doubled as beds while travelling). However chronology makes this difficult, as bastard is attested in Old French from 1089 (Middle Latin bastardus as early as 1010), yet Old French bast (modern French bât), though attested since 1130 with the meaning of "beast of burden", doesn't acquire the specific meaning of "packsaddle" until the 13c., making it too late to have given rise to the terms bastard and bastardus with this sense. The French Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales supports the Germanic theory further above as being most likely. See: Middle English Nouns 'bastard', English Nouns 'boose', French Nouns 'bât'.