bastardism

English

Etymology

From bastard +‎ -ism.

Noun

bastardism (countable and uncountable, plural bastardisms)

1. (uncountable) The condition of being born out of wedlock; bastardy.
   • 1829, Alexander Maxwell Adams, The Crawfurd Peerage, page 50:

     So much in those days for royal bastardism.

   • 1853 May, “State of Things in the Kingdom of Sardinia”, in The Christian World, volume 4, number 5, page 208:

     At least in the case of the election of that illustrious bastard who took the name of Clement VII, the cardinal electors were given to understand that their favorite candidates bastardy was not quite uncontroverted, or uncontrovertible; but in the case of the clergymen alluded to, no doubt could be entertained as to their bastardism on account of the civil marriage of their parents .

   • 1858, Robert Paine Dick, Marriage and Population, page 34:

     Among the atrociously unjust arrangements arising from prejudice and bad law, there is none greater than that of saddling a guiltless man with the stigma and legal disabilities of bastardism, because of acts of his father, which the son could in no way control.

   • 1912, “Flint v. Pierce”, in The New York Supplement, volume 136, page 1059:

     This prohibition does not only apply to her competency as a witness, but it is a rule of law governing any right of action which she may set up involving such bastardism of her own offspring born in wedlock.

   • 2009, Simon Reid-Henry, Fidel and Che:

     Off the sports pitch, however—and perhaps this was the reason he first took to it—Fidel suffered from bullying about his bastardism, rumours of which had spread north to Banes from the Las Manacas ranch in Bira/n, and then south to Santiago, along the lines of money and influence of his father's circle.

2. (uncountable) A tendency to produce bastards; lack of chastity.
   • 1877, James Maher, Patrick Francis Moran, The Letters of Rev. James Maher, D.D.,, page 313:

     A full one-third, and oftentimes more, is expended upon officials and in defraying establishment charges; the remainder is wasted upon the most worthless and vicious of the population, and in sustaining bastardism.

   • 2005, Siddiqi Majid, The British Historical Context and Petitioning in Colonial India, page 34:

     These included "Bastardism", the alleged tendency among the French of begetting illegitimate children, with which they might be expected to swamp Britain and "to weaken the State" itself.

   • 2005, Usha Sharma, Marriage in Indian Society: From Tradition to Modernity, page 226:

     As has been said before, it is only in that portion of Constantinople which is under Christian civilization that bastardism, street immorality, and adultery prevail.

3. (uncountable) Racial impurity; that state or quality of being mixed-race.
   • 1779, "Continental Currency", “To the Public”, in United State Magazine:

     The old man of the family is a mulatto, the mother an Indian; only one of the race has any tolerable pretensions to whiteness of complexion, and this must be the effect of bastardism or of some wild anomalous lusus naturae, or whim of nature, as the philosophers call it, which however has no influence upon his low manners and native stupidity.

   • 1900, Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Betty, page 209:

     We may well shudder in thinking of the results of such marriages from the triple view of criminality, bastardism of the race, and wretched homes.

   • 1914, Central Conference of American Rabbis, Yearbook - Volume 23, page 321:

     It is also of importance to the argument as to the bastardism of the Jew to know that the Kohanim (priests) whose racial purity would seem to bring them nearer than any other division of Jewdom to the original type, show, anthropologically, no divergence whatever from the mass of the Jews.

   • 2000, Lucien Giles Taylor, Créolité: The Anatomy of an Antillean Literary Movement, page 106:

     Négritude played a dreadful role in this. That's to say, our bastardism wasn't accepted serenely. But nowadays more and more Antilleans are seeing that bastardism, blending, and impurity are fundamental values — and that they're in the process of spilling out over the whole world.

4. (uncountable) Sexual reproduction involving different species.
   • 1886, Richard E. Kunze, “Reports from States on the Status of Eclectic Medicine: New York”, in Transactions of the National Eclectic Medical Association, volume 13, page 85:

     It is generally well known that all efforts of bastardism to propagate are sterile, and we need not witness the efforts of the horse and mule trying to create a new and better species.

   • 1912, University of Leeds, “Cabbage-top in Swedes”, in Bulletins, page 3:

     That the seed is not responsible seems certain, since when "bastardism " does occur among swedes, the appearance of the plant differs markedly from that of one affected with cabbage-top.

   • 1937, Hobbies - Volumes 18-20, page 14:

     Focke gave a remarkable history of plant bastardism and described Mendel's experiments .

5. (countable, uncountable) An unnatural combination; a mixture of things that do not belong together.
   • 1842, The Foreign Quarterly Review, page 396:

     The Dukes of Savoy did not reside on the sunny side of the Alps till about the middle of the sixteenth century, and even then, far from becoming naturalized to the climate of Italy, they gave Piedmont that tinge of French bastardism, against which the newly arisen national spirit is now so successfully reacting.

   • 1864, Voice of Masonry and Tidings from the Craft - Volume 2, page 183:

     The innovations and bastardisms wrought into Masonry since 1844, by that unfortunate book, exceed, when summed up, the innovations and bastardisms from all other sources united.

   • 1875, O. W. Wahl, The Land of the Czar, page 107:

     The younger generation, born in Russia, but brought up in genuine German style, anxious to pass of for Russians by the adoption of the language and manners of the country, generally share the unfortunate fate of a go-between or neuter production, for they deceive nobody by their swagger, least of all the Russians, sho esteem far more the original German character than this kind of bastardism, which is devoid of a decided national basis.

   • 2003, Pablo Vila, Ethnography at the Border, page 323:

     Border literature, Chicano literature for Polkinhorn, is subversive because it is "bastard", and its bastardism lies in the change of linguistic code and in the nonrecognition of the identity or relationship of Chicanos and Chicanas with an external "us."

   • 2022, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South, page 127:

     I have to say, I also probably don't define myself anymore as a person coming from Mexico, so it's just a hybrid— a kind of bastardism, a mix of different things.

6. (uncountable) Ideological concern with whether someone is related by blood.
   • 2006, Dorothy Palmer, When Fenelon Falls, page 213:

     Bastardism is everywhere. In the Tiny Tears commercial a three-year-old tells her dolly not to cry because "she's her very own baby"? Don't you see? It's Bloodspeak, right in the language: Comes by it honestly.

   • 2022, Cristina Morales, Easy Reading: The new novel from the Spanish literary sensation:

     You could say that bastardism is my ideology, even though María Galindo despises the notion of ideology because its authoritarian and academic and, therefore, embedded in the hierarchical structures of patriarchy.

7. (countable, uncountable) An act or quality of being bastardly; contemptibleness, cruelty, or lack of proper behavior.
   • 2005, Jonathan Dunn, The Hedonist, page 11:

     By God, indeed; I cannot stand your bastardism, Jacques,” and I took my blanket in hand, dashed from the room, and made my bed in the hallway.

   • 2008, Mark T. Conard, The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers, page 153:

     His worldview has several euphemistic aliases— "rugged individualism," "egoism," or "social Darwinism," to name a few— though in his case, "pitiless, selfish bastardism” may be more accurate.

   • 2010, Barney Ronay, The Manager:

     Bastardism, as an approach, had already been applied with some success. Major Buckley was notably scary.

   • 2010, David Farrell Krell, Purest of Bastards:

     Yet the bastardisms of writing and of being— of what Heidegger calls Seinverlassenheit, the abandonment of being by being, and of what Derrida calls destinerrancy, the radical insecurity to which all destining, sending, and writing are exposed— still call on us to think, so that a confusion of all the old grandfathers is probably inevitable.

   • 2019, Lesli Richardson, Tymber Dalton, Governor Trilogy Box Set: Governor, Lieutenant, Chief:

     Susa's brains and contacts, my tactical skills and bastardism, and your face and moral compass.