'Bastard' is closer to a spit than a word. It sits with its fellow expletives in a no-man's-land between language and violence, waiting to strike in a way no argument can.
My dictionary defines an expletive as "an exclamation or swearword; an oath or sound expressing emotion rather than meaning".
Expletives are often indicative of a failure of reasoned speech, and really are no more to be regarded as forms of expression than cudgels or knives.
But "bastard", as well as being an expletive, is code for a highly stigmatised condition, for which the stigmatised individual has had no responsibility. The circumstances of your birth are the circumstances of your birth, but the description, by virtue of having acquired a thick coating of cultural venom from its transferred usage as vulgar abuse, inflicts accusation and punishment in a manner more akin to a blow than a word.
When someone is called a bastard, there is little the target can say in response. Reeling between the ambiguities of archaic literalism and the multiple meanings of a hackneyed expletive, even a mature and knowing victim is rendered inarticulate by confusion.
If the word is applied to your child, you can respond with violence to the attacker or put your arms around the assaulted to mitigate the hurt. But there is nothing constructive to be said by way of reply, no words with which one can, with reason and dignity, answer back. To call this public discourse, therefore, is to misunderstand what words are and how they represent the sole alternative to violence.
This is why talk about "free speech" is so out of place in the present controversy. Those who have cited John Stuart Mill's brilliant polemic on thought and discussion in On Liberty (to suggest that there should be a place for such epithets in public discussion) do a disservice to his argument and display ignorance of its context.
Mill's analysis centred on the idea that freedom of expression is essential for democracy, and that the disadvantages of unrestricted discourse are minor compared with what is gained. But this needs to be seen in the context of his broader objectives. Although he named freedom the highest value of social life, he had in sight the goals of social well-being, moral truth, and a progressive society.
Freedom of expression was a means to an end succinctly articulated in the principles of the Irish Times Trust: "The progressive achievement of social justice between people and the discouragement of discrimination of all kinds."
Mill's argument was aimed at making the public square amenable to ideas which might otherwise be excluded from debate, to make more democratic a public discourse in which powerful interests could maintain certain orthodoxies at the expense of dissenters at the margins. His interest was in the small voice, not the loud one.
Mill did indeed deal with intemperate discussion. But although in favour of maximised freedom of expression, he never suggested that there should be no limits.
Objections to invective, he suggested, would have some merit if applied to both sides: the problem was that such objections were generally made or sustained with a view to protecting the arguments of the all-powerful prevailing opinion.
He also cautioned that condemnation of invective was often used as a device to stifle unorthodox opinions. This suggests why offence alone is insufficient to justify limits on debate.
If the test were to be offence to those whose opinions are attacked, he argued, "experience testifies that this offence is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that every opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer, appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on the subject, an intemperate opponent".
But he most certainly did not regard intemperateness and invective as healthy elements of debate; at best he regarded them as tolerable evils in a climate of equality. "Whatever mischief arises from their use," he wrote, "is greatest when they are employed against the comparatively defenceless".
Most of the time, Kevin Myers employs invective against the defenders of orthodoxies with the means and ability to respond. That they often do so by disputing his right to employ the mode of expression he has chosen is usually indicative of the opportunistic taking of offence for reasons of intellectual or polemical inadequacy.
But the issue here is not that Kevin offended against prevailing opinion, that he got up the noses of ideological opponents, or even simply that he gave offence.
The issue is that, through the particular use of a single word, last Tuesday's Irishman's Diary crossed a line not, in fact, between words that are acceptable and words that are not, but between language and a form of violence that must be perceived not merely in the meaning of what we take to be a word, but in the apprehension of this "word" in the psyche of the defenceless assaulted.