bugger

   Technically this is a reference to a sodomite, but the word is very frequently used in the northern counties of England to mean little more than ‘chap, man’. At its most pejorative it is a synonym of ‘bastard’. The Blinder, by Barry Hines, has a boy saying to another: ‘Clever bugger, tha knows what I mean.’ You stingy bugger’ is used in the same book. When the Boat Comes In, by James Mitchell, another novel set in the north east of England, has many examples of ‘you stupid bugger’, ‘you daft bugger’, etc., used as mild insults by both men and women. A Cack-Handed War, by Edmund Blishen, has ‘you silly bugger’ used by one man to another on a farm. Authors sometimes indicate dialectal pronunciation of the word by variant spellings, such as ‘bogger’ which occurs in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, by Alan Sillitoe, or the ‘booger’ which is in Henry Williamson’s Devonshire stories. The Sillitoe examples show working-class usage of the term in Nottingham. ‘Yer little bogger’ is used with affection to a young boy by a male friend of the family. ‘Bugger’ is also heard in the southern counties of England, but with less frequency and often in the euphemistic form ‘beggar’.

   The term is derived ultimately from Bulgarian, the Bulgars having acquired in former times the reputation of being sexual deviants. All the examples quoted above of ‘bugger’, ‘beggar’, etc., refer to British usage, but the term is also used in the USA. In Joseph Wambaugh’s The Choirboys a Los Angeles policeman says to a man who has attacked him: You dirty little bugger!’