The word puggle can be either a noun or a verb. The verb “to puggle” means “to push or poke a stick or a wire down a hole and work it about in order to clear the hole”. The source of this word seems to be an earlier verb “to pug” meaning to hit or punch (in turn “pug” was probably onomatopoeic – and is the source of the American slang word for a boxer: a “pug”). The listener (in her letter) says that she’s familiar with this verb “to puggle” because her father told her that when he was about five or six years old, on the way to school he puggled a hole in a dead tree and out came a horde of angry hornets who stung him all over his head. Fortunately, she adds, it was wash day and his mother covered him in blue from a blue bag. But what about the noun puggle? What is a puggle? (That was Richard Morecroft’s question.) Used as a noun puggle (sometimes spelled poggle) means “a crazy or foolish person, an idiot”. It comes from India, from the days of the British Raj, and the source is a Hindi word pagal with almost the same meaning (“madman, idiot”). Perhaps, if you go about puggling holes in dead trees that makes you a bit of a puggle! - via Google!
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