bastardisms

Noun

bastardism (countable and uncountable, plural bastardisms)

1. (uncountable) The condition of being born out of wedlock; bastardy.
   • So much in those days for royal bastardism.1829, Alexander Maxwell Adams, The Crawfurd Peerage, page 50
2. (uncountable) A tendency to produce bastards; lack of chastity.
   • 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.1877, James Maher, Patrick Francis Moran, The Letters of Rev. James Maher, D.D.,, page 313
3. (uncountable) Racial impurity; that state or quality of being mixed-race.
   • 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...1779, "Continental Currency", “To the Public”, in United State Magazine
4. (uncountable) Sexual reproduction involving different species.
   • 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.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
5. An unnatural combination; a mixture of things that do not belong together.
   • 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...1842, The Foreign Quarterly Review, page 396
6. (uncountable) Ideological concern with whether someone is related by blood.
   • 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.2006, Dorothy Palmer, When Fenelon Falls, page 213

See all 7 meanings of bastardism