7 June 2020
What do a bad score on a golf hole, an enemy aircraft, and a child’s nightmare have in common? The names for them all come from an old word for a ghost or evil spirit, in another word, a bogey.
The root of the term is bug, meaning a ghost or goblin. The origin of the root is uncertain, though. It’s probably from a common Germanic root, but there are also Welsh and Irish cognates, which allows for a possible Celtic origin for the word. These, however, appear later and are probably borrowings from English rather than vice versa. Bug appears c. 1395 in a Wycliffite translation of the Roman Catholic Bible, in Baruch 6.70:
As a bugge either a man of raggis in a place where gourdis wexen kepith no thing, so ben her goddis of tree.
(As a bug or a scarecrow in a place where cucumbers grow does nothing, so do their wooden gods.)
In Scotland and the north of England, bug developed into bogle, the use of which dates to the opening years of the sixteenth century when it appears in the Scottish poet William Dunbar’s The Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, where one woman uses it to describe her slovenly and unattractive husband, lines 111–12:
The luf blenkis of that bogill fra his blerde ene
(As Belzebub had on me blent) abasit my spreit.(The love glances of that bogey from his bleary eyes
—as if Beelzebub had looked upon me—abased my spirit.
The form bogey comes to us either from bogle or directly from bug, we can’t tell which. It’s a much later development, appearing in the nineteenth century. The earliest use of bogey that I’m aware of is in a nickname for the devil. From Thomas Ingoldsby’s 1838 “Grandpapa’s Story—The Witches’ Frolic”:
The cups pass quick,
The toasts fly thick,
Rob tries in vain out their meaning to pick,
But hears the words “Scratch,” and “Old Bogey,” and “Nick.”
The word is generalized within two decades, when it’s used metaphorically to refer to menacing humans in Sherard Osborn’s 1857 Quedah:
It may be supposed that nothing was more keenly sought for, by all on board the “Hyacinth,” than news about Malay pirates, those ogres, those bogies of the Archipelago.
The golfing sense of bogey appears by 1891 and comes from the idea of a phantom player. The original golf sense was that of par, the score that one is expected to beat. This system, which is the basis for modern professional golf tournaments, was originally dubbed the ground score. Supposedly in 1890 one player, a Major Wellman, who was unfamiliar with the new system and evidently disappointed with his own performance on the links, took a cue from a popular song of the moment, “The Bogey Man,” and claimed to be playing just such a figure. The name caught on and appeared in print by the next year. From the 28 November 1891 issue of The Field:
The members of this club have lately been trying, with success, a somewhat novel form of competition, introduced from Great Yarmouth by an ex-member of the U.S.G.C. The object of the scheme is to decide a competition by holes, without the lengthy process of everyone playing everyone else. The competition is conducted by all the players pitting their scores against a fixed round, with which an imaginary Col. Bogey challenges all comers, and it is won by the player who inflicts the most condign punishment on, or suffers least ignominious defeat, at the hands of this Col. Bogey.
The sense of bogey being one over par developed in the United States, a modification of the original British sense of bogey being par. The new sense appears by 1930 when it appears in the Los Angeles Times on 13 January:
The eighteenth, a difficult par 4, netted Smith a bogey, when his second stopped in the tall grass on a sloping hillside lie. He was on in three and down in two putts, his putt for a 4 just sliding by the cup.
The verb, meaning to shoot one over par on a hole, appears by 1935. From the Miami Daily News of 14 January 1935:
Bryan then bogied the next three holes, allowing Gormley to win them with par figures for four straight to forge ahead, one up.
The air force use of bogey to mean an unidentified aircraft dates to World War II. It is, obviously, also from the sense of ghost or phantom. From a story in the New York Herald Tribune (and syndicated to many other papers) on 11 April 1943, an American pilot tells of his time flying with the RAF in 1940:
On our first night-fighter patrol, we learned that teamwork between planes and ground radio stations is a most vital element. One foggy morning at 5:30 a.m., a flash came to our dispersal hut. A “bogey” (unidentified aircraft) had been detected by ground stations as it started across the Channel toward England. Interception was ordered, though there was a chance it might be a friendly plane returning from a mission.
[...]
Then a laconic report came through from the nearest ground station: “Bogey identified as ‘bandit’” (enemy aircraft).
Finally, the boogey-man (also boogie-man and booger-man) is an Americanism for an imaginary monster or spirit conjured up to frighten children. This term is recorded by 1847 in a story titled “White Jim,” about a young child kidnapped by native Americans:
One day, early in September, the two girls returned home after having been at work with their father in the corn-field, and inquired of their mother what had made James cry so—they heard him scream, “The booger man has got me,” but thought nothing of it, supposing him with her. The mother at once became deadly pale; she had supposed the child was safe with them all the while, and now flashed upon her the painful conviction, that he was lost in the woods, if a worse fate had not befallen him.
The kidnapping took place in 1827, but as the story is told twenty years later, we cannot assume the boy’s words are accurate renditions of what he actually said. The story ends with the boy, now a young man, being reunited with his parents. The use of booger man here, as with the use of bogey to refer to the Malay pirates, is loaded with racist undertones, identifying people of color as demonic.
Sources:
Dunbar, William. Selected Poems. Edited by Priscilla Bawcutt. London: Longman, 1996, 39.
Godwin, Frank. “Bryan Beats Gormly to Wear Mid-Winter Crown.” Miami Daily News, 14 January 1935, 18.
Ingoldsby, Thomas. “Family Stories. No. X. Grandpapa’s Story—The Witches’ Frolic.” Bentley’s Miscellany, vol. 4, July 1838, 507.
Lawrence, Edward. “Shute 147; Horton Smith 149.” Los Angeles Times, 13 January 1930.
McCloskey, John J. “Night Fighters.” New York Herald Tribune, 11 April 1943, 7.
Middle English Dictionary, 2018, s.v. bugge n.
Osborn, Sherard. Quedah; or Stray Leaves from a Journal in Malayan Waters. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1857, 17.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. bogey, n., bogy | bogey, n.1, bogle, n.1, bug, n.1.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2006, s.v. booger, n.2. and September 2018, boogie, n.1.
“United Service Golf Club, Portsmouth.” The Field, The Country Gentleman’s Newspaper, no. 2031, 28 November 1891, 842.