Last week I was arguing with my Dutchie buddy on the use of the English word ‘bastard’. Either he was being mischievous or he really meant it; he called a girl bastard but the girl argued that bastard could only refer to boys and not girls. My Dutchie buddy didn’t believe her. I understand that bastard originally means someone born outside a legitimate marriage, and although it was clear from dictionaries that the word could refer to a child of either sex, but I have always thought that it originally only meant a illegitimate son. In order to prove my point, I quickly looked up German and Dutch dictionaries online, then told my Dutchie buddy: the German word Bastard and Dutch bastaard are both masculine nouns, and if those words can indeed refer to both genders, they should have been of neuter gender like the word Kind (which means child in both German and Dutch). My Dutchie buddy wasn’t convinced, so I sought to look up an etymology dictionary for the origin of ‘bastard’. It turned ou