Critters, jitters, and transmitters: the history of ‘bug’
Bug has various common uses, and none of them are particularly pleasant. Whether you’ve come down with a bug, found a bug on your phone, worried about the Millennium bug, or been bitten by a bug, you’re unlikely to welcome the bug into your life. But how did the word come to mean such disparate things?
Objects of terror
The earliest use of bug is one which is seldom heard today: ‘an object of terror, usually an imaginary one’, such as a hobgoblin or bogy. This is found as early as the mid-15th century, but fell into disuse when bug became more commonly used as a different word: the name of an insect.
It has been suggested that the Welsh bwg, meaning ‘ghost’, played a part in this word’s etymology; today you will only find bug used in this way in the compound bugbear (originally a scary, imaginary being invoked to frighten children, now used to denote any cause of anxiety) and bugaboo (an object of fear or alarm, mostly used in North America).
Bites, dances, and germs
Fast forward to the mid-17th century, and bug was being used for a different word altogether: the Cimex lectularius (known as the ‘bed-bug’) and, more broadly, for various insects. While the origins remain unclear, this bug may have developed out of confusion with the earlier budde. There is a possibility that there is a link between the two different bugs so far mentioned, but little evidence has yet been found for this.
Thus the noun largely seems to have stayed for a couple of centuries, but by the mid-19th century, bug could be a person obsessed with an idea or set upon an action. An early use in an 1841 American newspaper delineated a ‘tariff bug’, but more lasting examples are found in jitterbug, litter-bug, and fire-bug. The first of these originally meant ‘a jittery or nervous person’, from jitter meaning ‘to move in an agitated manner’; the fast dance popular in the 1940s followed a little later.
By the early 20th century, bug was also being used for ‘a microbe or germ’, possibly from the idea of catching something unshakeable; bug meaning ‘concealed microphone’ (first found in the 1940s, according to current OED research) followed suit.
A bug in the computer?
Much was made of the Millennium bug or Y2k bug during the years leading up to 2000; it was believed that software would be unable to deal correctly with the final two digits of the year changing to ‘00’, confusing the year 2000 with 1900. Though panic turned out to be largely unjustified, it did put this sense of bug firmly in the public consciousness – but bug meaning ‘a defect or fault in the machine’ dates back over a century further. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) cites the Pall Mall Gazette of 11 March 1889:
Mr. Edison, I was informed, had been up the two previous nights discovering ‘a bug’ in his phonograph – an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble.
The story that one of the early electromechanical computers suffered a failure because an insect had crawled into the machine and been squashed between moving parts of a relay switch, thereby jamming it, may well be true – but is evidently not the ultimate origin of the this sense of bug.