Mum friend has told me off for using the word 'bugger'

[OohMavis]

Because her 3yo has been saying it, and she thinks the only person she knows who uses the word is me. She isn't happy.

Now, I'll hold my hands up and fully acknowledge that not everyone considers the word bugger to be an innocuous, and at times endearing, way to refer to your children And in any other circumstance I would have profusely apologised.

Except... her 3yo swears like a sailor seriously, the kid swears more than me. We all went out shopping together once, me and her and all of our kids, and he spent the entire time hollering FUUUUUCCCK CCCUUUNNNTT from the back seat. She said it's because he hears her swear all the time.

AIBU in thinking that the odd utterance of bugger is the least of her worries, and that she is taking the piss a bit in getting so annoyed with me? She hasn't stopped swearing, she isn't making an effort to stop him swearing. This telling-off has come out of the blue!

Re: Cars
It's the bit where everyone is cruising on the new road just before Lightning leaves Radiator Springs - he's about to cruise with Sally but then Lizzie steals him away and starts talking about Stanley when they would go cruising together. She says "he was a persistent little bugger for a two stroke"

I've found the USA to be similarly lax with 'shit' - which I found when, with great excitement, I showed DS the dvd of 'Flight of the Navigator'. One of the characters yells "don't you take any of their shit!"

It's a U certificate!!

A U!!!!!

"Bugger" is used in Bing. Ama calls them "noisy buggers."

Is it not beggars she says?

I have watched every episode of Bing at least 100000x. Ama calls them 'noisy bangers'.

i have fond memories of being told off by this woman walking a young child to school in front of me and my friends when we were about 15 and were swearing and joking about stuff.

She turned around and told us to 'stop bullshitting your language around little children'

um....

iamalsoSpartacus i thought twat means idiot until this thread!

I used to say cheeky bugger a lot but have made an effort to change it to cheeky monkey.

I'm from and lived over much of the south and it is definitely a term of endearment, like twat, it has another meaning that you are aware of but 99% of the time it is in context of 'you little bugger', 'oh you twat'. Twit and twat are basically the same to me. First time I called someone a twat in front of OH his was very shocked, and I was confused.

Well you learn something new every day - I'm from up north, use it all the time...have recently moved down south, still use it far more often than shit for example...I wonder how many people I've offended

I'm from down south, and I'd say bugger is somewhere between bloody and shit on the scale of bad words. It was definitely not a word to use with parents until we were old enough for them to have given up on trying to control our language (i.e. late teens.)

It can mean partaking in anal sex when used as a verb, but is as likely to be used to mean messing about (buggering about) or broken (it's buggered). I did have to explain to a Belgian colleague that he could not say that a client was buggering him, and it was definitely not a synonym for bugging him, which was what he actually meant. Have also had a German use the word fuck in the middle of a fairly formal training session. It's so common in films and the like, he hadn't realised it's still unacceptable in some contexts.

I used to think twat only meant idiot or twit, and to twat someone meant to hit them. I was probably mid-20s before I learnt it could mean anything else.

We had a teacher in the 6th form who objected to the boys using berk, "don't you know its origins?" (No, just thought it meant silly idiot.) I suspect none of the boys bothered looking it up, but I did and discovered it derived from rhyming slang for Berkshire Hunt. Never quite had the nerve to ask if he would have been okay with the boys using words like berk and cunt when we girls weren't around. (He was a bit of a sexist dinosaur, though.)

And then there was the teacher who objected to my suggestion of a colloquial version of "couldn't care less" as "couldn't give a toss," which I had never heard of in terms of masturbation. Learnt a lot more from them objecting to certain words and phrases than if they'do just ignored it and assumed I was as naive as I actually was.

Bigger is not an acceptable word to use in the US and Canada. I found that out 😂

It's fine over here as a noun! "I dropped my can and that bugger rolled all the way down the hill." "My nephew is the cutest little bugger."

Hey I was thinking bugger was never ok but I suspect it was because I was saying bugger off or something. Do you think it might be a regional thing?