buggish

English

Etymology

bug +‎ -ish

Adjective

buggish (comparative more buggish, superlative most buggish)

1. Characteristic of or resembling a bug; buglike.
   • 1996, Jeffery Deaver, A Maiden's Grave:

     'What?' Budd whispered, his eyes on the buggish headlights of the harvesting threshers.

   • 2000, Lana Witt, The Heart of a Thirsty Woman, page 177:

     Clarence looks into his rearview mirror and finds that the small buggish car is still following him, and its horn beeps every few minutes.

   • 2000, Lance Olsen, “Strategies in the Overexposure of a well-lit space”, in Lidia Yuknavitch, L. N. Pearson, editors, Northwest Edge: Deviant Fictions:

     One second he's there and the next he detonates, ka-blam!, covering the ceiling, which has become ants, and the walls, which have become ants, and the floors, which have become ants, with, weh-hell, ants and more ants and chunks of organs and flaps of skin and wads of hair, his organs and skin and hair, which now sprout compound eyes and six legs apiece and antennae and almost imperceptibly small stingers on their bottoms a-and start tooling away, single-file, a miniature battalion of buggish body parts marching in different directions, merging with the ant-soup all around them, the an sea, the great ocean of Antlantis, […]

   • 2012, Daniel Coleman, Gifts and Consequences:

     His buggish eyes were as prominent as the full moon overhead.

2. (obsolete or dialect) Uppity.
   • 1843, Baynard Rush Hall, The New Purchase: Or, Seven and a Half Years in the Far West, page 183:

     Meanwhile, rumour had been tramping about with her crescit eundô; and, long before the Faculty received our Scytala, they had heard her cry— "The Board has told Major Thorntree, the Faculty shall be tried and turned right out, and shall be sued for damages done the school and the State, and— Woodville, by their unconstitutional, high-hand, big-buggish, aristocratic yankee notions!! "

   • 1873 March, Ann S. Stephens, “The Lost Inheritance”, in The Peterson magazine, volume 63, number 3, page 216:

     "Thought you big-buggish, and set up, with all those fine things; and I should have felt just so," answered Mrs. Thorp.

   • 1906, John Stephen Farmer, Six Anonymous Plays, page 152:

     (Will I?) I, that I will; a fart for the bragger! He shall down if he give me but one buggish word.

   • 1995, Kenya National Assembly Official Record (Hansard):

     If my old friend the late Argwings Kodhek was still alive he would qualify to become the Chairman because he was a brilliant lawyer and not a buggish type, but a lawyer who understands all the aspects of law and who can do a good job.

3. (obsolete) Frightening; like a bugbear.
   • 1879, Edward Arber, The English Scholar's Library of Old and Modern Works, page 107:

     Of father Anchises thee goast and grislye resemblaunce, When the day dooth vannish, when lights eke starrye be twinckling, In sleepe mee monisheth, with visadge buggish he feareth.

   • 1884, Letters of the martyrs of the English Church, page 321:

     The buggish bishops cannot make such-a-one afraid; because they cannot take away one hair from our head until God give them leave, which I am sure He will not do, until such time as He shall see it most to His glory, and the profit of His saints; ane when that time is once coe, who will desire to tarry here any longer?

   • 1972, Garry Wills, Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion, page 240:

     But he also mocked the government for its exaggerated reation, its attempt to whip up fear over this plot — hues and Cries raised, fright bruted in the peoples eares, and all mens eyes filled with such a smoake, as though the whole Reqalme had bene on fire, whereas in truth it was but the hissinge of a few greene twigges of their owne kindling , which they might without any such uprores have quenched with a handfull of water, but that it made not so much for their purpose as these buggish and terrible shewes . . . (and) generall demonstrations of a needles feare.

4. (slang, jazz) Crazy.
   • 1930, Sleepy John Estes, Milk Cow Blues:

     Now asked sweet mama to let me be her kid She says I might get buggish I couldn't keep it hid.

   • 1938, Willie Bee (James), Washboard Sam, My baby's getting buggish:

     (see title)

   • 2003, Paul Garon, The Devil's Son-in-law, page 19:

     Ohh, little girl got buggish, she throwed all of my clothes outdoors.