Bah humbug!

Charles Dickens may have coined the phrase “Bah, humbug!” via the mouth of Ebenezer Scrooge, of Christmas Carol fame, but what’s a humbug? In the slang of Dickens’s era, it meant anyone or anything silly, stupid, or bothersome, qualities unfairly ascribed to a kind of stag beetle (Lucanus cervus), Britain’s largest beetle, called “humbug” in some English dialects.