The term is thought to have emerged around the early 13th century, after Pope Innocent III and the northern French kingdom engaged in the Albigensian Crusade in southern France.
This led to the slaughter of about 20,000 men,[2] women and children, Cathar and Catholic alike and brought the region firmly under the control of the King of France.
For instance, within the Anglo-Indian community in India the word bugger has been in use, in an affectionate manner, to address or refer to a close friend or fellow schoolmate.
[4] In 1978, Mr Justice Sir Melford Stevenson, QC was reprimanded for calling the British Sexual Offences Act 1967 a "buggers' charter".
In Anglophone Southern Africa, Australia, Canada and Britain, "buggered" is colloquially used to describe something, usually a machine or vehicle, as broken.
In this latter form it found fame in New Zealand in 1956 through rugby player Peter Jones, who—in a live post-match radio interview—declared himself "absolutely buggered", a turn of phrase considered shocking at the time.
In the pre-watershed television version of Four Weddings and a Funeral the opening sequence is modified from repeated exclamations of "Fuck!"
See also fuck all, sweet FA, and Llareggub ("bugger all" spelled backwards, a fictional Welsh town in Dylan Thomas' radio play Under Milk Wood).
Eric Partridge defined embuggerance factor as "a natural or artificial hazard that complicates any proposed course of action".
[12] Terry Pratchett used the word in this sense when he referred to his Alzheimer's disease, which had prevented him from attending conventions, as "the Embuggerance".