bzzz.

n.  a buzz indicating an error or malfunction.

<With a sinking feeling, I trudged up to my room and swiped my key through the lock.  It emitted a soft, unsatisfied bzzz and lit up.  “Please see the front desk.”  My room had been reassigned, too.  —Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.>

n.  a deliberately mumbled word, due to passive-aggression.

<[Finon] prods Maura to be the gracious hostess: “Get the sherry, woman, get the sweets for the babas.”  Maura doesn’t move, pretends not to hear, mumbles to herself.  Finon gets up to find the sherry.  “Where did she hide it?” he yells into us.  “In the bottom of the bzzz,” Maura answers, and then adds in an aside to us, “so ignorant, that man.”  — Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland, Twentieth Anniversary Edition.>

n.  a placeholder expression, like “such and such.”

<I had a model about what psychosexual stages were.  I had a whole set of models.  The person would say “Bzzz” and that would go into this category in my head and I would say, “Oh yes.”  Under Category A I would give Response 3.  Now I didn’t have it that exact, but it was that kind of a dance.  They’d say, “My mother bzzz,” and I’d write it down, and they could learn when to get the pellet.  —Ram Dass, The Only Dance There Is.>

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