Did he mean to say "boggles my mind"? Maybe, maybe not. It buggers the/my mind gets 50-some Google hits, and mind-buggering (combining hyphened and hyphenless spellings) nets roughly 300. Mind-buggering could be an eggcorn* -- an inadvertent reanalysis of the idiom -- but it's impossible to tell; mind-buggering, at least for English speakers who use bugger to mean "mess with, screw up," would be a perfectly logical expression. But Americans don't use that bugger much; I wonder how it sounded to the public radio audience.
My research into the term, however, turned up an even more interesting question. Did Douglas Adams use the term mind-buggering in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"? Several citations from bloggers credit him with the coinage, and a couple of PDFs of (what seems to be) the text show the relevant paragraphs -- the arrival of the Vogons, Ch. 3 -- reading thus (my bold):
"What the hell's that?" [Arthur] shrieked.But the editions available (and searchable) on Amazon have it as "tore the sky apart with mind-boggling noise and leapt off into the distance." So if you've got an early edition of the book at hand -- or any other clues to the authenticity of that "mind-buggering" version -- please share.
Whatever it was raced across the sky in monstrous yellowness, tore the sky apart with mind-buggering noise and leapt off into the distance leaving the gaping air to shut behind it with a bang that drove your ears six feet into your skull.
* Mind-buggering is not in the Eggcorn Database, but the Forum section of the site offers examples of many other mind-boggling variants, including mind-bugling, mind-buckling, mind-blogging, mind-bungling, and mind-bottling.
14 comments:
I got my copy of the original trilogy in 1983. If that's early enough for your query, I can confirm that it is "mind-buggering" in that addition of HHGTTG. Since "bugger" in that sense is a Br/Commonwealth usage more than N.Amr, it was unremarkable here in NZ.
"It buggers the mind" was an undergraduate eggcorn that turned up when I was a teaching assistant at Syracuse in the 1970s.
The version for sale at Amazon.co.uk has "mind-buggering" - I just checked. So this may be a case of "Americanizing" the text.
English English and American English can be very different. Unlike maxqnz, I would have boggled at "mind-buggering" even though I'm Canadian and quite used (so I thought) to Englishisms.
Re the eggcorns: "Mind-buckling" makes a lot of sense, as in "mind-bending" but I think my favorite variant just has to be the very confusing "mind-bottling" although it could be a good euphemism for drinking.
The panelist also might have been going for "beggars belief." I take it to be more common in British English, but my American Heritage offers the example "beauty that beggars description."
Here is The Phrase Finder's take on the idiom: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/beggars-belief.html
Hmmm, I've never heard of "mind-buggering" but I've heard people use other terms to complain about ideas which have had traumatically intimate relations with their brains.
My copy of The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide (1996) has "mind-boggling."
My favorite, though, is "mind-bottling," complete with explanation of the idiom.
Ridger, thanks for the additional datum -- I should have thought of that. Wonder if the edit was made to use a more familiar idiom or to clean up the language? -- or maybe both. And are there other BrE-to-AmE changes?
And Jonathon, thanks for the clip -- hilarious.
"Wonder if the edit was made to use a more familiar idiom or to clean up the language?"
In one of the books, he talks about a "Silver Rory, for the most gratuitous use of the word fuck in a serious screenplay". It may have been this that was bowdlerised for US publication. Something was, leading him to insert a whole segment about "Belgium" as a universally taboo vulgarity in a later part of the series.
My Pan paperback edition, which was published in Canada, apparently in 1979, uses the "mind-buggering" variant.
Jonathan Langsner
Thank you for introducing me to my new favorite vocabulary word: "eggcorn".
I often silently cringe when I hear someone inadvertently revise an idiom during conversation. I never knew there was a word for this, though I probably should have.
I just found "The Eggcorn Database" online, and the number of entries boggled (bungled?)my mind! This could entertain me for hours!
Is there any relationship here with 'mind-f*cking' or 'brain-f*cking'?
Might a copy editor have read 'bugger' broadly, to mean 'f*ck' and sought a tamer alternative?
Yup! can confirm the original books used the term mindbuggering. As it was used only once I bet it was an evil typesetter who did it for a laugh. I bought a class set of books from "Windmill school books" and was planning to read the book with the class, until I got to page 22 or there abouts. I'd designed work sheets and all sorts of stuff but when I came across that word I dropped the whole project. I did try to contact D.A. on the N.G. dedicated to him but I got flamed for not reading the FAQ. I eventually tracked him down on his web site where he stated that he didn't use the D.A. N.G. as he got flamed for pretending to be D.A.!! Anyway I posted a letter on the site but never got a reply...late the next year I heard he died, so I'll never know if it was intentional.
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