Bugger

The original senses of bugger , a predominantly British term, were powerfully xenophobic. Derived from French Bougre , from Latin Bularus meaning “a Bulgarian,” it meant “a heretic” from the fourteenth century and “a sodomite” from the sixteenth. However, in the modern period it shows generalization and loss of intensity, its original critical sense giving way to a wide variety of tones, also seen in bastard and bitch .

The cultural stereotyping behind the original meanings is illuminating. The sense of “heretic” derives largely from the Bulgarians belonging to the Greek Orthodox Church and subscribing to the Albigensian heresy. The medieval English church writer Dan Michel (ca. 1340) condemns “false Christians,” who in following their unorthodox belief are like “the bougre and the heretik and the apostate” (1866, 19). However, Robert of Brunne’s contemporary Chronicle (ca. 1330) retails this subversive view: “The King said & did crye the pape [Pope] was heretik and lyued in bugerie” (320). The sexual sense appears to be a malicious extension of the idea of perversion. The attribution of “filthy” sexual practices to freethinkers and religious “deviants” is an ancient and ingrained propagandist stereotype. (A similar relation lies in the semantic development of libertin , originally “a free thinker,” into libertine , a sexually decadent person.) A specific ascription of sexual deviancy to heathens is found in Fardel Facions (1555): “as rancke bougers with mankinde, and with beastes, as the Saracenes are” (II x 224). There is also the accusation directed against foreign usurers by Edward Chamberlayne in 1667: “The sin of Buggery, brought into England by the Lombards” ( On the Present State of England I, 41). The “sin of Buggery” is technically a problematic concept under English law, since it covers both sodomy (anal intercourse) and bestiality (sex with animals). In general usage the first meaning is dominant. Thus John Florio’s Worlde of Wordes (1598), an English/Italian dictionary, defines Italian bardascia as “a bardash, a buggering boy, an ingle.”

The shift to a general term of abuse, insult and as an expletive is apparent in two quotations in the Oxford English Dictionary: the first from Thomas D’Urfey in 1719: “From every trench the bougers fly”; the second from the Court Sessions in 1794: “She said, b-ast and b-gg-r your eyes. I have got none of your money.” This is also an early use of the verbal sense, now general in modern phrases like “bugger you!,” “bugger off!,” “bugger all,” and the less virulent sense of “bugger up,” meaning “mess up” or “destroy.”

In contemporary global English the distribution of bugger among different speech communities is surprisingly varied. It is generally prevalent in the British, Australian, and South African varieties. (Afrikaans even has boggeral , a “calque” or loan translation of “bugger all.”) In all of these it can even be used playfully and affectionately, as in “he’s a nice old bugger” or “you lucky bugger!” Australian English has the common phrase burnt to buggery . The word has also been taken into pidgin English, where it has no stigma and is therefore widely used in the forms baga , “person” and lesbaga , “lazy bugger.” The highly generalized verb bagarap , from “bugger up,” in its intransitive use carries all the senses of “break, have an accident, become injured or exhausted, disintegrate.” The transitive form is bagarapim , meaning variously “to destroy, break, rape, render useless.” The Australian newspaper reported in 1975 that “Prince Charles broke into Pidgin at the end of his speech [in Papua New Guinea] saying: ‘Af de ren I bagarap mi nau arait,’ which meant ‘Unfortunately rain caused me some inconvenience yesterday, but now everything is all right.’” (September 19, 1). However, the term has not really taken root in American English: Mencken noted that bugger was “not generally considered obscene in the United States” (1936, 314), a situation that still seems to obtain. The pronunciation is often different (as “booger”), and the main survivors are the euphemized forms “bug off!” and “bugged up.”