Bugaboo

[Dr. Goodword]

• bugaboo •

Pronunciation: bêg-ê-bu • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: Something frightening or threatening.

Notes: Today's Good Word is a member of a family of semantically related words that are probably historically related, too, including bugbear, bogy, bogyman and regional boogerman. Though there are slight differences in the meanings of these terms, the B and G are hardly coincidental in all these words.

In Play: Often we find bugaboos around the house: "I hesitate to clean up the basement for fear of what bugaboos might lurk there in all the clutter." However, basements are not the only place where bugaboos lurk: "Rising home prices in the US raise the specter of that old economic bugaboo: inflation."

Word History: Today's Good Word is probably a corruption of bugbear under the influence of Boo!, an interjection expressed to frighten others. (It may also have been helped along by Old French Beugibus, the name of a demon, today's English Beelzebub.) Bug originally meant "ghost, hobgoblin" in English. It originated in Welsh bwg (pronounced bug) "ghost, goblin". This word probably descended from the same root that provided Russian bog and Polish bóg "god", another kind of ghost. The bugs that haunt computers did not originate in a moth that died in a Harvard computer in 1947, as is widely claimed. It more probably came from the bug in bugaboo, a hobgoblin. In any event, it was first recorded in an 1889 article in the Pall Mall Gazette referring to an unexpected defect or bug in Thomas Edison's phonograph. The word subsequently came to refer to disquieting insects, which is how it is most often used today. (In order to avoid any bugaboo of omission, let's thank Mark Bailey right now for suggesting today's Good Word.)

[Philip Hudson]

Create any system and some bugaboo will come in to foul up the works, creating a SNAFU. In WW II, the Army Air corps took advantage of this phenomenon in writing their aircraft maintenance manuals. The gremlin was either created by them or quickly adopted by them. In my Uncle JM's B17 maintenance manuals, cartoons of gremlins populated the pages. He left those manuals, which he was allowed to keep after the war, in my grandmother's back closet. I coveted them, but cousin John confiscated them.

When I began as a systems engineer in the 1960, I thought there could be something better than bug to describe those destructive glitches in computer software. I guess computer engineers are not very imaginative. But then, I wrote many of the manuals, so probably it was incumbent on me to come up with a better name. I know I fought for the word "bar", as in candy bar, to name small electronic elements on a single substrate. I lost and the word chosen was "chip".

[Perry Lassiter]

Yet you write pretty clearly, Phillip. Why did they translate your manuals through Japanese and back into English by one of your ESL students?

And btw, bugaboo for me carries the connotation of a minor and probably unnecessary fear.

[Philip Hudson]

Perry, are you commenting on the bugaboo topic? I am a little puzzled. Is there a joke that I didn't catch? I was a systems engineer, not a software engineer. It was my job to write specs and user manuals.

I have used automatic translation programs and translated back to English to see the results. English to Spanish back to English goes pretty well. English to Japanese back to English, not so much. And have you ever tried to assemble anything made in China by the English instructions written by a Chinese speaker who learned English in school?

I once applied for a job at Cisco Systems. I was to write manuals for a system that already had subsystem manuals written. I said I would first have to rewrite the subsystem manuals. (They had been written by the interviewer.) For some reason I didn't get the job.

And BTW, don't use bugger to mean snot. It means something else to some people. But then snot probably means something else too.