LizzieMaine
Bartender
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- Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
I read an interesting essay in our local alternative weekly which included a brief discussion of the word "ba***rd," which nowadays is used in an almost jocular, teasing way -- "you old ba***rd, you." But in the Era, calling someone a ba***rd was one of the most vicious insults you could throw -- an illegitimate person was, in "respectable" society, as well as in certain ethnic groups, essentially a non-person, and the general attitude in those classes was generally to blame a person for the circumstances of their birth. If you were illegitimate -- a ba***rd -- in society's eyes, you carried that stain to your grave. Calling someone a ba***rd in certain circles could -- and sometimes did -- get you killed.