Australia was vulgar! Yes, but vulgarity is what inoculates us against sclerosis. Australia is stuck in the past! We’ll get to that.Ĭoren even questioned our country's record with Indigenous populations and film production, thereby constructing the biggest glass house since the Crystal Palace. The line of attack Brit jingoes chose was a strange one. Now that English cricket is back down in the doldrums (AKA its natural habitat), and Australia is on top again, it might be time to send some of that crowing back return-to-sender. Coren is an English restaurant critic (poor bastard), a position a bit like coaching Eddie the Eagle to a “Most Improved” award. So his job is to be irascible.īut his criticisms of Australia seemed a little stale, like they were trapped in 1979. So much has changed since then – in those days, Britain was still facing a bitter winter of social unrest, failing infrastructure, and a Conservative government cutting services to the quick. I remember Giles Coren sledging our nation, asking what we had when we didn’t have any cricket any more. “You look at the wider Australian cultural scene and you are forced to ask: ‘What have you got when Rolf goes?’” That’s Rolf Harris for Australian readers – he’s part of Britain’s cultural firmament, and look how that’s turned out. When they were on top, I don’t remember those pious organs piping up over rotating casts of substitute fieldsmen, or time-wasting, or any of the other tweaks that put a bite of fire in the spirit of the game. Or how it was, the new version being no quarter given, and the lack of quarter being complained about by the English papers.
That’s how it is, no quarter given, no quarter given. Then the Poms go off and get beaten at rounders by the Dutch.
POMMIE BASTARD ORIGIN SERIES
My own dream result is an Ashes series so one-sided cricket gets banned by the Queen: every field salted, every bat thrown into a bonfire, even the word “cricket” expunged from the language, like a damnatio memoriae in the old times. It is used of things spurious or not genuine, having the appearance of being genuine, of abnormal or irregular shape or size, and of mongrels or mixed breeds.We should be honest here – no Australian wants an even contest against the Old Enemy. Among the "bastard" words in Halliwell-Phillipps' "Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words" are avetrol, chance-bairn, by-blow, harecoppe, horcop, and gimbo ("a bastard's bastard").Īs an adjective from late 14c. Its use as a generic vulgar term of abuse for a man is attested from 1830. The figurative sense of "thing not pure or genuine" is by late 14c. An alternative possibly is that the word is from Proto-Germanic *banstiz "barn," equally suggestive of low origin.Ĭompare German bänkling "bastard child begotten on a bench" (and not in a marriage bed), the source of English bantling (1590s) "brat, small child." Bastard was not always regarded as a stigma the Conqueror is referred to in state documents as "William the Bastard." "illegitimate child," early 13c., from Old French bastard "acknowledged child of a nobleman by a woman other than his wife" (11c., Modern French bâtard), probably from fils de bast "packsaddle son," meaning a child conceived on an improvised bed (saddles often doubled as beds while traveling), with pejorative ending -art (see -ard).
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