‘Oh, bother!’ Winnie the Pooh said it. I used to like watching the annual showing of Winnie The Pooh And The Blustery Day when I was little.
Recently I’ve been watching a lot of Good Eats. Alton Brown says ‘Oh, bother’ a lot.
So what’s wrong with it? The animated bear and the occasionally over-animated cook are merely saying something is bothersome, right?
Only I recall in one of the Discworld books, Lord Vetinari was called ‘Dog Botherer’ when he was in Assassin’s School. Clearly, the insult was meant to imply 'dog buggerer.
So when we say, ‘Oh, bother,’ are we really saying ‘Oh, bugger’, or ‘Oh, F*ck!’? How closely are ‘bother’ and ‘bugger’ linked in this context?
But the other usage long, long predates Discworld and is used in many contexts (such as Winnie the Pooh stories) where it’s clear that what’s meant is an extremely mild oath (about half as forceful as “Rats!”). There’s also the closely realted “botheration” (for which here’s a cite that includes a 1918 quote).
Dog bothered, sheep botherer and so on are common terms for someone who shags animals - Pratchett didn’t invent it. They bother the animals. I don’t think it has anything to do with bugger.
I believe when dogs or wolves are hunting or chasing sheep, they are said to be “bothering” them. It’s not implying shagging at all, it’s literally being a bother to them.
Which is not to say the phrase hasn’t been extended into a euphemism since.
Immensely popular, the Thomas the Tank engine series, written and produced in England, is where I heard “Oh bother” a lot since Winnie. I would think the impact from Thomas the Tank Engine is more relevant to keeping the saying alive right now. Alton Brown most certainly says it now, too. My kids, several years removed from Thomas, still say it.
“Oh, Bother!” is, of course, an extraordinarily mild oath- the sort of thing that one could safely exclaim in front of The Queen, or your Great-Grandmother, without causing the slightest bit of offence to anyone at all- and as such has become a marvellous oath for understated irony when something is truly, utterly, spectacularly fucked up beyond any hope of recovery and “Bugger” is too obvious an expletive for the occasion.
in the magnificent “Compete with the Germans” episode (filmed in Belgium, where Germans and Brits traditionally settle their differences), the Germans were of course subtitled.
At one point in time, as a German driver frantically tried to change gear while yelling “Scheissgangverschaltung!”, the BBC thoughtfully translated his Germanic polysyllabic curses to “Oh, bother.”
Note that Pratchett also uses “god-botherer” to refer to priests, and while priests on Discworld almost certainly don’t bugger the gods, they might well annoy them.
Also note that the usage of “bugger” to mean “sodomize” is very rare in the US, so one referring to children as “buggers” probably means it just in the sense of “person or thing that bugs”.
It’s pretty rare here too. It’s certainly pretty much never meant when we use bugger in a slang sense. You’ll even hear surprised people say ‘bugger me!’ and I don’t think they’re asking for the arse fandango.
I’m not so sure… “little bugger” when referring to children is fine, but if were to hear the verb “bugger” the first thing I’d think of is buggering. What else could it possibly mean? I’d have to say that using “bugger” in common parlance in the USA has to be more common than using “sodomize,” which is really very clinical. Really, what would you say in a bar room discussion where buggery becomes the topic?
