from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
noun An object of often obsessive fear, anxiety, or irritation.
noun A difficult or persistent problem.
from The Century Dictionary.
noun A bugbear; a bogy; a vain terror; something to frighten a child.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
noun Something frightful, as a specter; anything imaginary that causes needless fright; something used to excite needless fear; also, something really dangerous, or an imaginary monster, used to frighten children, etc.
noun a source of concern.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
noun Alternative spelling of bug-a-boo.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
noun a source of concern
noun an imaginary monster used to frighten children
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[Perhaps of Celtic origin and akin to Welsh bwg, ghost.]
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Examples
My main bugaboo is Labour's obession with non essential NHS staff-I know of a mental health trust that has a communications staff of 10 - and I have no doubt that this is also true throughout the country.
Rothbard extended its basic point into the market itself, and pointed out that in a free market, large firms tend to be unstable, and the ‘one big cartel’ bugaboo is totally unstable; just as unstable as a socialist system.
In my own country, our bugaboo is Japan and while our munitions makers in America are preaching to us the doctrine, "Look out for Japan," over in Japan, the same identical munitions industry is preaching a doctrine to the people of Japan that has them saying, "Look out for Uncle Sam; look out for the United States" all of which is a very profitable foundation for those industries engaged in the manufacture and sale of munitions of war.
Those universal Green OA mandates by authors 'institutions and funders (which Elsevier's Green policy greatly facilitates) -- along with time itself -- make it increasingly difficult for publishers even to contemplate back-tracking on their Green policies. back-tracking bugaboo, which is about as valid as the publisher lobby's repeated bugaboo that OA will destroy peer review.
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