The June 2019 update to OED3 has many lovely lexicographical additions: the first three listed are ‘ayuh’, ‘bae’, and ‘ball sack’ (if that gives any indication). Twitterati have commented on ‘upper-class twit’ and ‘you (wee) dancer’. But what caught our eye was the adjacent article by senior editor Matthew Bladen on revisions to “bastard, n.” Bladen writes:
bastard has undergone a fundamental transformation in the last 150 years, in which a strand of meaning that was still marginal at the time of the first edition of the OED has become central to the word’s existence.
There follows a detailed story of semantic drift, which starts with ideas of suspect marriages and ends with semantically emptied terms of abuse.
But the word’bastard’ itself has (what I’ve called elsewhere) “dubious parentage”. That is, no one knows where it comes from. As Bladen recounts it:
It was once believed that bastard, denoting an illegitimate child, was coined in allusion to a perceived tendency for such people to be conceived on a ‘bast’, or packsaddle, serving as a temporary bed (an early reference to the supposed proclivities of the commercial traveller). However, this is now generally considered to be unlikely, and a more plausible explanation is that Read More