The Jokes thread

DickCappels

Joined Aug 21, 2008
10,661
This chap was sobbing his heart out in a cemetery - looking reproachfully at a particular grave. His paroxysm of grief moved some passers by and one of them attempted to comfort him.

"I say old chap - get a grip - you really must be able to move on." "Did your wife die unexpectedly?"

"No - you've got it all wrong ," was the answer. "It was my wife's first husband who died - this is his grave."
 

DickCappels

Joined Aug 21, 2008
10,661
As soon as I could I bought a house and avoided having a landlord. It was not as much about how kind they were but how much they complicated my life and that of my family (in the US)
 

DickCappels

Joined Aug 21, 2008
10,661
This illustrates the frustrations in a patent examiner's life. :- ) You can patent anything in the U.S. if it is efficacious. This one is kind of a stretch, and very funny.
 

cmartinez

Joined Jan 17, 2007
8,768
While I definitely got a laugh, I wonder if the person that wrote it is aware that, in practice, bastard is almost as gendered as lord, especially with the meaning intended here.
Beats me. English is not my birth language. So some subtleties escape me every once in a while.

But I looked up the definition of bastard, and it definitely seems ungendered to me. Unless it's customary to assign it a male context by default in american language.
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
32,878
Beats me. English is not my birth language. So some subtleties escape me every once in a while.

But I looked up the definition of bastard, and it definitely seems ungendered to me. Unless it's customary to assign it a male context by default in american language.
The definition of bastard as meaning the child of unwed parents is ungendered. But that is not the usage that is implied by saying they should be referred to as landbastards. Who cares if the person that owns the place you rent was born to married parents. The definition that is being implied there is the slang meaning of being a mean or contemptible person. In practice, that is almost always applied to a male. A mean and contemptible female is generally referred to as a bitch.
 

ThePanMan

Joined Mar 13, 2020
921
In practice, that is almost always applied to a male.
I think that is your perception and likely the way you've used the word but I'd have to see some proof from a legit source to come close to agreeing with your suggestion.
Am I a legitimate source? All my life I've believed that a bastard was a fatherless boy. While yes, that's true, I never thought the term also applied to a girl. On the other hand, the term I've always and only associated with a girl was bitch. And I've never heard that applied to a boy. Gosh it's fun saying those words and getting away with it.
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
32,878
Am I a legitimate source? All my life I've believed that a bastard was a fatherless boy. While yes, that's true, I never thought the term also applied to a girl. On the other hand, the term I've always and only associated with a girl was bitch. And I've never heard that applied to a boy. Gosh it's fun saying those words and getting away with it.
When the term is used to refer to the marriage-status of the parents, it is more or less genderless. If you talk about someone's bastard child, you might be referring to a boy or a girl. But when referring to a particular person as being a bastard, it was more common to use the term applied to a male because of the reason that the term was developed in the first place -- it was for the legal purpose of distinguishing the inheritance rights of the children and, at the time, in many places women couldn't inherit (and often only the oldest male child could), so there was little point in identifying a woman as being a bastard. There was relatively little stigma associated with being a bastard, but you can imagine the kinds of attitudes and actions that came to be associated with those bastards that sought to claim their place in a family or what they saw as their rightful inheritance. That's the root of "acting like a bastard" and it's use as a general pejorative evolved from there just as many other terms change from saying that someone is acting like something to being that they are that something (think "ass" as an example). Today is it used almost exclusively as a pejorative and referring to its original meaning is almost never intended and is even used as the basis for jokes. There's the classic line from a Bill Cosby skit where, when his wife was hit with a contraction during childbirth, she announced to everyone that Bill's parents were never married.
 
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