In tones that people generally reserve for small children, they hold out the old bugaboo: Be good or the income tax will get you.

The old bugaboo of dynamics cropped up again in the concerto.

But then the old bugaboo about surviving came to the fore, and I had to cope with that.

One culprit was that old bugaboo - computerized program trading, one of the few unrestricted American imports into Japan.

The old bugaboo of "the liberal media" haunted editors.

That old bugaboo of overwatering plants in plastic pots is not the problem it once was, as gardeners are learning how to manage them.

Senator, that's an old bugaboo that should long ago have been laid to rest.

Yet efforts to identify the source of that predilection have proved far more intricate than a matter of the old biological bugaboo, "female hormones."

Therapists are, of course, never "neutral," that old psychoanalytic bugaboo.

And as a result of this, all of Man's old bugaboos, all of his old killers, were being held at bay.