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bugbear

[buhg-bair]

Origin

Bug Bear www.target.com/ Bug Bear Online. Shop Furniture at Target.

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noun

any source, real or imaginary, of needless fright or fear.

a persistent problem or source of annoyance.

Folklore. a goblin that eats up naughty children.

Origin:
1570–80; bug² + bear²

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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Link To bugbear

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Bugbear is always a great word to know.

So is interrobang. Does it mean:

a stew of meat, vegetables, potatoes, etc.

a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.

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Collins

World English Dictionary

bugbear (ˈbʌɡˌbɛə)

—n
1.	a thing that causes obsessive fear or anxiety
2.	(in English folklore) a goblin said to eat naughty children and thought to be in the form of a bear

[C16: from bug² + bear²; compare bugaboo]

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Etymonline

Word Origin & History

bugbear

1580s, a sort of demon in the form of a bear that eats small children, also "object of dread" (whether real or not), from bug (n.) + bear (n.).

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Related Words

bête noire

Matching Quote

"The general doctrine about knowledge which I sketched at the beginning of this section, which is the real bugbear underlying doctrines of the kind we have been discussing, is radically and in principle misconceived. [It] would be a mistake in principle to suppose that the same thing could be done for knowledge in general. And this is because there could be no general answer to the questions what is evidence for what, what is certain, what is doubtful, what needs or does not need evidence, can or can't be verified. If the Theory of Knowledge consists in finding grounds for such an answer, there is no such thing."

-J.L. Austin

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bugbear

bug·bear