He was no standard bastard; he was a dastard. In a world where some go per ardua ad astra, he had neither ardua nor astra. His skullduggery was of the skulking and drugging kind, and though he thought himself a wizard, he was merely a coward, a laggard, an ill-starred sluggard.
We will give him, at least, that he was no braggard – that would have meant owning up to his dastardly deeds, and he was too cowardly for that. He could only stab you in the back when his own back was turned – as though the b of bastard were facing away, d – and whether the ill deed was done or not, he could say no more than “drats.”
You may, perhaps, not have met the word dastard as such before. I think you’ll know the word dastardly, though it’s a bit antiquated now – it has the air of mustachioed villains and other pusillanimous vipers of the melodrama era. But just as cowardly is like a coward, dastardly is like a dastard; we have had dastardly since the mid-1500s and dastard since the mid-1400s. And while the -ard is on the model of coward, bastard, and wizard, all from French, dastard is like laggard, sluggard, and drunkard in having a Germanic root taking on the suffix to mean ‘one who does this dirty deed like a dirty bird’ (note, by the way, that words ending with ard that make it rhyme with “hard” or “bard” rather than “word” or “bird,” especially if they have any stress at all on the syllable, have nothing to do with all of this – so no diehard, no discard, et cetera).
And what is the Germanic root in this case? We’re not entirely sure, but evidence suggests that dast is from dased, which is none other than an old form of dazed, and meant ‘dull, inert, stupefied’. So originally a dastard was someone who shrunk from any deed of valor through the most elementary pusillanimity. In fact, it first referred to someone who was simply a dullard, and then over time it added the sense of villainy, of crimes not just of omission but of commission… but only in the most cowardly way. A snake. Or, perhaps, a poisonous turtle.
Sesquiotica 