The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Bugbears and Bedbugs

The previous story has an instructive little postscript. Within a few years, golfers had forgotten the origin of the word bogey and the par score for a course was blamed on a fictional golfer named Colonel Bogey. A book of golfing cartoons from 1897 contains the line: ‘I, Colonel Bogey, whose score is so uniform, and who generally win …’

This meant that in 1914, when Kenneth Alford wanted a name for his brand-new marching tune, he called it ‘Colonel Bogey’ and thus bogey returned to the world of song whence it had sprung.

So who or what was the bogeyman? Bogeymen come in all shapes and sizes. Some are shaped just like bears. They live in the woods and they eat small boys who don’t do as they’re told. These are bogey-bears. However, the bogey-bear has diminished over the years. He has faded from his ursine grandeur, both in threat and in the length of the term. Nowadays a bogey-bear is a mere bugbear, and far from devouring a child whole, he is an insignificant annoyance.

Likewise, a bugaboo is now scoffed at by everyone except James Bond. James Bond is very careful about bugaboos and usually checks for them under his bed. Well, etymologically he does.

In the eighteenth century a bugaboo (which is of course a variant bogeyman) became thieves’ slang for a sheriff’s officer, or policeman. Nineteenth-century burglars were therefore scared of bugaboos or bugs for short. But they kept burgling anyway, and burglaries continued all the way into the twentieth century. Indeed, they were so common that people started to set up burglar alarms, and in the 1920s burglars began to call burglar alarms bugs on the basis that they acted like an automated policeman. If a solicitous homeowner had fitted an alarm within his house, the joint was said to be bugged.

From there it was one small step for the word bug before it was applied to tiny listening devices that could be placed inside telephones or teapots. And that’s why James Bond checks his room for bugs, and that’s also why there could actually be an etymological bogeyman hidden beneath your bed.

Bogeys and bugs have always been pretty much interchangeable. Myles Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the Psalms renders the fifth verse of the 91st Psalm thus:

Most subsequent Bibles have used the word terrors; Coverdale’s is therefore known as The Bug’s Bible. Then, in the mid-seventeenth century, bug mysteriously started to mean insect. Perhaps this was because insects are terrifying, or perhaps because they used to get into your bed like a bogeyman. The first six-legged bug on record was a bedbug in 1622. Since then, though, the word has expanded to mean any sort of creepy-crawly, including insects that crawl inside machines and mess up the workings.

There’s a story that one of Thomas Edison’s inventions kept going wrong. Edison couldn’t work out why his machine kept breaking down, but break down it did. He checked all the parts and they worked. He checked the design and it was flawless. Then he went back to check the machine one last time and discovered the cause of the problem. A small insect was crawling around over his delicate electronics and messing everything up. This, so the story goes, is the origin of bug in the sense of a technical failing.

This story may not be completely true, but it’s certainly the case that Thomas Edison was the first person to use bug in the technological sense. In 1878 he wrote in a letter that:

And in 1889, the Pall Mall Gazette reported that:

So the insect story could be true, or it could simply be that Edison was referring to bogeyman sprites that haunted his machines, working mischief in the mechanism.

Whatever the origin, the word bug caught on, and when your computer crashes due to a software bug, the fault lies with Thomas Edison and the bogeyman.