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Miss Poubelle was surprised to see in Rolling Stone a movie review that included the sentence "Sin City has a restless bug-fuck vitality." Despite her best attempts to keep up with contemporary slang, she had no idea what bug-fuck meant. Not so long ago, one might have had to live with the shame of not knowing a new bit of slang-- but luckily we now have Google. A search revealed dozens of examples.

Some typical examples-- "John Ashcroft is bugfuck crazy" (www.way.nu/archives/000015.html); "Bugfuck Terrorist Threatens State Department With Nukes" (http://buttersquash.net/archives/2003/10); "They're just writers writing stories because they admired Howard, but they don't understand you have to be bugfuck to write that way!" (http://harlanellison.com/foe/bugfuck.htm)

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From the context of these and other examples, it is clear that bugfuck must mean "crazy." But the Internet also turned up the interesting fact that a legal case once hinged on this definition.

Harlan Ellison is a renowned sci-fi/fantasy author, and several of his works have been adapted as graphic novels. In 1979 he was interviewed for The Comics Journal, and in that context referred to the work of cartoonist Michael Fleisher. Ellison said Fleisher's work was bugfuck.

Fleisher sued Ellison for libel, claiming that this description had harmed his career. Ellison's lawyers claimed that bugfuck was in fact meant to be an admiring description of Fleisher's daring. This seems to have been a bit of lawyerly dissimulation-- the larger context of Ellison's interview, he had also said that Fleisher was twisted and deranged, and that his work was the product of a sick mind.

Ellison was eventually acquitted of libel-- Fleisher failing to prove that he had been harmed by the bugfuck description. (For more fascinating details of this trial, Blanche recommends www.ansible.co.uk).

From the viewpoint of a language watcher, the case is also interesting because this 1979 interview is among the earliest recordings of the word bugfuck. Bugfuck is, however, first attested in 1970 and identified as military slang.

The question of why it should mean this is harder to be sure of. Bug was used to refer to those obsessed with some activity or enthusiasm as early as 1841, though this now sounds a bit old-fashioned to us. Bug lives on in litterbug-- one obsessed with littering-- and in some nicknames like Bugs or Bugsy, which were originally given to people who acted crazy. Bughouse was used to mean "insane asylum" from at least 1902. The term buggy can also mean "crazy" in some contexts.

How do we get from buggy/bugsy/bug to bugfuck? Here the story becomes less clear. But there does seem to be a parallel evolution in words like batshit, chickenshit, ratfuck, and dumbfuck. In these cases also, there are parallel forms of the word like batty, rat, and dumb. The pattern seems to be that English speakers can take pejorative words and intensify them by adding a taboo syllable at the end. So if batty means "crazy," then batshit is even more crazy. And if rat can mean "despicable" (as in rat bastard), then ratfuck is even more despicable.

Another intensifying process-- frequently, but not always, pejorative-- seems to affect words like big-ass, bad-ass, fat-ass, stupid-ass, and ugly-ass. Given combinations like ugly-ass shoes and big-ass truck, it's clear that there are uses of these words where -ass is some kind of intensifier, rather than a literal reference to the butt.

Adding -fuck, -shit, or -ass is a vivid word-formation process in English, though it currently seems fairly limited in its use. Still, Guide readers can no doubt create some other vivid adjectives to describe our current government and its policies. But hurry and do it before the ratshit Patriot Act and our turdfuck Attorney General make it illegal to do so.