ABSTRACT
A rugby captain lost his temper with the game's commissioners who, in their multitude, had been governing the sport badly–he called them "57 old farts". Thereafter the word was "in". Its popularity became slightly embarrassing when Will Carling, the rugby star in question, turned out to be a current lover of the Princess of Wales whose language problems were of a different order. Again, when in the spring of 1995, the British prime minister referred, in a momentary loss of his vaunted cool, to his opponents in the Tory party and in fact in his own Cabinet as "bastards", the word replaced in every British newspaper–and even in polite London society–the usual circumlocutions for scheming or otherwise untrustworthy colleagues. "Bastardy" was less a matter of illegitimacy, for all had a right to be as right wing as their convictions or ambitions took them.
