I did some quick, clarifying online searches while drafting what ended up being my TDOV poem post (which, tragically, shows up as an April Fools post cos of time zones I guess). I sought confidence on the differences between boogie, bogie, bogey, and boogey. The fun part is that no one seems terribly concerned with the spelling, so there're many meanings crammed into one silly word.
From Wikipedia:
A bogie in the UK, or a railroad truck, wheel truck, or simply truck in North America, is a structure underneath a railway vehicle (wagon, coach or locomotive) to which axles (hence, wheels) are attached through bearings. In Indian English, bogie may also refer to an entire railway carriage. In South Africa, the term bogie is often alternatively used to refer to a freight or goods wagon (shortened from bogie wagon).
I'd never heard of this one. Maybe it'll come up on Jeopardy some day.
This is where things get interesting (if you find the dictionary more interesting than the colonial propagation of train terminology).
From The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition:
n. An evil or mischievous spirit; a hobgoblin.
n. A cause of annoyance or harassment.
n. A golf score of one stroke over par.
n. (Chiefly British) The number of strokes that a good player is likely to need to finish a golf hole or course.
n. (Slang) An unidentified flying aircraft.
n. (Slang) A detective or police officer.
n. (Chiefly British Slang) A piece of dried or semisolid nasal mucus; a booger.
v. To play (a hole in golf) scoring one stroke over par.
Here you have a sound splitting between the categories of 'various undesirables' and 'golf lingo' (I'll leave you to come up with your own punchline here). I found a third strain on Wikitionary:
n. engineering A representative specimen, taken from the centre a spread of production - a sample with bogey (typical) characteristics.
I hadn't heard of this one either, except maybe in the term "bog-standard", which got me onto Gary Martin's Phrase Finder, where he suggests it came from UK technical hobby communities in the 60s. He also provides a crisp, vectorized chart (meaning I can't embed it here) suggesting use of the term has steadily risen over time, and also took pains to defend the honour of Stephen Fry -- because of course Stephen Fry would cameo in a fact-finding sidequest this autistic.
This is where things get interesting (if you find swing dancing more interesting than vectorized charts).
From the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
n. (Music) an instrumental version of the blues (especially for piano).
n. (slang) a black person; -- offensive and disparaging.
v. to do a lively dance, often with the two partners not touching, to the accompaniment of rock music.
I'm hardly scratching the surface, but I don't think it's a stretch to suggest this set of definitions charts the extraction of African-american culture over time. Wikipedia helps fill in the details of the early history, weaving threads from potential West African etymological roots to the industrial sounds and labour of the railroads in Texas to the dance halls and rent parties of Harlem, all under the banner of boogie, all before white people got in on it. Quite a odyssey, if you're curious.
It's timely, since I've been reading the autobiography of Malcolm X, and it turns out he considered himself staple of those rent parties in his youth. The mental image of young Malcolm with straightened hair and a zoot suit, exclaiming 'gimme some skin, daddy-o' while smoking reefer at a boogie was not in my 2026 forecast, but here we are.
He and Alex Haley describe 'lindy hopping', the fashionable dance of the era which, while certainly 'lively', would be an odd sight if the partners didn't touch at all. Maybe, as the term was bleached into a white mainstream, it became a sanitized non-contact activity. I did another quick search to corroborate that theory and found an excellent video essay on the history of swing dancing by Tanita Dee. She lays out how the white american mainstream clumsily took it up as a national symbol after a few decades of derision. Worth a watch, if you're curious. There's also a sweet set of comments beneath from a dancer who worked on Spike Lee's Malcolm X biopic.
This is where things get interesting (if you find ambiguity more interesting than trains, the dictionary, or Malcolm X).
Fewer dictionaries dedicate an entry to "boogey" compared to the rest of the spellings; the Wikitionary page is made of redirects:
n. Alternative form of boogie (“type of dance”).
n. Alternative form of bogey (“type of hostile supernatural creature”).
That's the heart of this post -- why I could make a bogey/boogie joke in the opening of Bogeywoman -- so many moments held in two syllables -- why I wanted to be intentional with my spelling.
However, the Villains Fandom Wiki undoes all this work of distinction:
Full Name: The Bogeyman
Alias: The Boogeyman, The Bogieman, The Boogieman, Monster Under the Bed, Monster in the Closet
I suppose it's hard to trap the boogeyman between letters. The Wikipedia page has collected an extensive list of hideous creatures all over the world meant to frighten unruly children into obedience, some of them even women. No doubt it flattens cultural differences, but what's striking to me how some elements repeat -- the focus on the child's naughtiness (often misbehaviour or staying out too late), how the monster steals the child away (often in a big sack), and what it does with them (often gobbles them up). It's like all the parents of the world needed a trick to play on children's primal fear and keep them in line. I'm sure this has no worrisome long-term consequences at all. It's all meant for the child's safety, but as we all know, the safety of children is not always a priority for those who wield it as a cause.
I guess that's what fueled me to write Boogeywoman -- reading, seeing, feeling every day how trans women are being billed as monsters, to be shooed under the bed or into the closet -- an ugly threat to keep everyone in line. I'm lucky to feel mostly safe from that circus, at least for now. I'm just whispering my notes onto the net. I've made myself a bit sad, but I hope I've at least offered you a few interesting topics to explore, if you're curious.
Keep on boogieing, boogeying, bogieing, and bogeying