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"Bastard" doesn't necessarily mean that the person being told that is bad, it is just a claim about his origin.

"I will fuck you" means that the speaker is sexually attracted to the person being told that.

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    Like many words, bastard is bad when used as an insult. But it might be true: the common usage today is "mean or despicable person". You'll see that "born of unwed parents" is given as archaic use. Commented Jul 24, 2022 at 11:37
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    Please do more research. Then you can edit your question to explain why you are still confused. Commented Jul 24, 2022 at 11:47
  • Let me explain the first (you added the second question later). At one time it was socially unacceptable to be "born out of wedlock". So calling someone a 'bastard' was an insult, and worse if it wasn't true. But now, the meaning is as given in the dictionary. Commented Jul 24, 2022 at 11:54
  • @JeffreyCarney, I'm sorry, I finally found the answer after asking the question in many different ways.
    – AZeed
    Commented Jul 24, 2022 at 12:03
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    in some uses bastard is an affectionate term as in, for instance< the old bastard. Probably best to avoid this as a learner though in case you get it wrong.
    – mdewey
    Commented Jul 24, 2022 at 12:21

2 Answers 2

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"Bastard" is a bad word because it is almost always used as an insult. It is almost always used to disparage somebody. There are some contexts where this word (and other insults) are accepted, for example if a young man says about his friend that the friend is "a cool bastard". Here, an actual insult is used to sound "cool" or "edgy". But this use can be very tricky for non-native speakers, so it's better to just not use insults.

Why is "bastard" almost always considered to be an insult? Because over a large portion of history and in many cultures, being a "bastard" was considered something bad. A "bastard" is an offspring from a relationship that is considered less valuable, maybe from a relationship that is considered altogether "illegitimate" (just this way of saying it tells a lot). So if you called somebody a "bastard", you actually said that this person is of lower value. This is almost automatically an insult.

Considering "fuck", this word for sexual intercourse it simply very rude. With many things, you can use words that are more polite, or words that are more rude. With some things, rude words are considered especially glaring. Sex and intimacy are among those. So you probably want to be extra polite, extra indirect with those topics, to not to step on people's toes.

Regarding

"I will fuck you" means that the speaker is sexually attracted to the person being told that.

that's so much simplified that it's basically wrong. "I will fuck you" is on the one hand really rude and impolite. On the other hand, it's stated as a fact. Consider the difference between

I will eat this cake.

and

I would like to eat this cake.

With "I will fuck you", you're not stating a wish or a request, but a fact. That could easily be read as an announcement of rape. If you said "I would like to fuck you", it would be a little better, but still considered quite rude. And it would probably still not cause the desired result ;) As I said, with sex and intimacy you want to be extra, extra, extra careful.

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A word's origin is not the right way to determine wether a word is offensive or not, but instead, the right way is to check how socially accepted that word is. And if you still insist on saying a currently bad word, no matter how much you convince the person being told that it isn't bad in its origin, it would still remain unacceptable by him/her.

"Fuck" means emotionless sex, it is like rape.

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    You're getting nearer. But the key point is that it doesn't matter the tiniest bit what the underlying meanings of the words are. Our society has collectively decided that, at the moment, fuck is a seriously "bad word" - though not as much as it was fifty years ago. Go back a hundred years or more, and religious words like damn and devil were seriously "bad words", but now for most people (not all) they are pretty well phatic i.e empty of lexical meaning, but used to express emotion.
    – Colin Fine
    Commented Jul 24, 2022 at 12:12
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    I have certainly heard people use the word fuck when it was clearly a consensual relationship.
    – mdewey
    Commented Jul 24, 2022 at 12:22
  • @ColinFine, why is this question considered off-topic?
    – AZeed
    Commented Jul 24, 2022 at 22:50
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    @AZeed: I know no more than you do about why it was considered off-topic. LIke you, I can read the box at the top which gives the reasons.
    – Colin Fine
    Commented Jul 24, 2022 at 23:24
  • @Makyen, I don't understand "dropping a huge amount of nuance", do you mean that I asked in the question about the word in general and then mentioned only one usage of that word?
    – AZeed
    Commented Jul 24, 2022 at 23:44

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