“Boffin”

My friend Bruce Beans forwarded his “Word-of-the-Day” e-mail from Merriam-Webster. The word was  boffin, and M-W defined it as “a scientific expert; especially : one involved in technological research,” then provided this note:

“Boffin” is an informal word that is more common in the U.K. than in the U.S. It is a relative newcomer to the English language, only appearing toward the end of World War II. Despite its youth, however, the origins of “boffin” are a mystery to us. The term was probably first applied by British Royal Air Force members to the scientists and engineers working closely with radar technology. The term was soon being more broadly applied to scientists involved in technological research. British speakers also use “boffin” colloquially to refer to academics or intellectuals in general, often in a manner that is synonymous with “nerd” or “egghead.”

The OED is similarly circumspect on etymology. The editors sniff, “Numerous conjectures have been made about the origin of the word but all lack foundation”; apparently Dickens’ character Mr. Boffin in Our Mutual Friend is not considered worthy of mention. The dictionary does provides these illuminating early citations:

1945  Times 15 Sept. 5/4 A band of scientific men who performed their wartime wonders at Malvern and apparently called themselves ‘the boffins’.

1948 ‘N. Shute’ No Highway iii. 61 ‘What’s a boffin?’ ‘The man from Farnborough. Everybody calls them boffins. Didn’t you know?’.. ‘Why are they called that?’.. ‘Because they behave like boffins, I suppose.’

1948 Ld. Tedder in A. P. Rowe One Story of Radar p. vii, I was fortunate in having considerable dealings in 1938–40 with the ‘Boffins’ (as the Royal Air Force affectionately dubbed the scientists).

The word has been used once on this blog, by a commenter on the kit post:

‘KIT’, from my (UK) service days could be clothing/uniform – “sort your kit out!” – personal equipment – “don’t leave your kit around or it’ll go in the scan bag**” – and bigger things – “..it’s the latest all-singing-all-dancing swept-up bit of kit”. The latter was almost always ironic, usually said just before the wretched thing blew up on launch/crashed, to the merriment of all except attendant boffins.

Clearly, it’s a Britishism. But is it a not one-off Britishism? Well, yes, barely. The New York Times hasn’t used it since 2012, but that year it appeared three times in five months:

  • “Using its secret formula (note the sponsorship by Coca-Cola) that will next be assessed by the boffins who discovered the Higgs boson, Spain kept its spot at the top of the heap.” (Soccer story from  July 4, 2012)
  • “… the World Science Festival, the annual jamboree of science, culture and art that mixes boffins and boldface names.” (May 2012)
  • ” Alexander Hoffmann is no white-coated mad scientist, but a ‘quant,’ a computer boffin.” (Book review, March 2012)

And it shows up intermittently in the years before then.

So welcome to the fold, boffin. What you really need now is a proper etymology.

Marky Mark Talks British. Or Does He?

A few days ago, the American entertainer Mark Wahlberg gave an interview to The Sun in which he made some cutting remarks about singer Justin Bieber. Given that we are in a permanent silly season, it’s not surprising that his quote should have been picked up by new outlets all over the world, including my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer. Wahlberg–a former teen idol himself–supposedly apostrophized Bieber, telling him, in part: “Don’t be so naughty. Be a nice boy, pull up your trousers, make your mum proud.”

I say “supposedly” because the lingo is suspiciously British for a Bostonian like Marky-Mark. I’ve already covered trousers and mum on this site; naughty is certainly widely heard in U.S., but I believe it’s much more of a thing in the U.K., especially when applied to adults.

Presumably either Wahlberg tailored his diction to the Sun‘s readership, or the editors did the doctoring themselves. I suspect the latter. I couldn’t check the original quote because the Sun‘s archives are behind a paywall and I don’t subscribe. So all I learned at its site was “Gap Year Girls in Acid Attack” and “Towie Lucy Debuts Dodgy Afro.”

“Bairn”

The gossip writer for my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer used an impressive three Britishisms in two sentences in yesterday’s paper:

“Pop star-thesp Pink has been gushing about her daughter, Willow Sage Hart, since the bairn was born in June 2011. But Doylestown [Pennsylvania]’s proudest daughter wasn’t always so keen on becoming a mum.”

I’ve previously covered two of them; links will take you to the relevant entry. The third is bairn, meaning (one’s) child, which derives from the Old English bearn. It is found in Beowulf, written in 529, and the most recent citation in the OED is from History of the Norman Conquests, by E.A. Freeman:  “Harthacnut too..was at least a kingly bairn.” I get a sense that Freeman used it in 1867 because even then, it seemed like an antique word.

When one searches for it in a contemporary context, most of the hits refer to the expression “Jock Tamson’s bairns,” about which Wikipedia has some interesting things to say:

“We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s Bairns” is Lowland Scots and Northumbrian English for we’re all John Thomson’s children, It is a popular saying in Scotland and the far north of England, and is known in other parts of the world. Nowadays, the phrase is often used to mean “we’re all the same under the skin”.

It has been suggested as a euphemism for God, so the saying could mean “we are all God’s children”. The expression “We’re a’ the bairns o’ Adam”, conveys exactly the same meaning, see Freedom Come-All-Ye a song written by Hamish Henderson. Scottish Gaelic also has the shorter saying “Clann MhicTamhais” (Thomson/MacTavish’s children/clan). This is a common egalitarian sentiment in Scottish national identity, also evident in the popularity of the Robert Burns song A Man’s A Man for A’ That.

Although Jock Tamson’s Bairns is used as a personification of the Scots nation, it is also used to refer to the human race in general.

In the United States, bairn is very much a novelty item, used for variety or comic effect or elegant variation (both apply in the Philadelphia Inquirer item). The most recent use by a New York Times writer came in 2006, in a Natalie Angier column about mothers (in the animal kingdom) who eat their young or allow them to die:

In other cases, mothers turn infanticidal because they are born optimists, ever tuned to the sunny expectation that good times lie ahead. Each year they breed for a banquet, producing a maximum of begging bairns as the season starts; and when there is plenty of food, they will provision every young.

By the way, there may have been another word that puzzled you in the Inquirer item. Thesp was originated by the trade-newspaper Variety; it’s show-biz slang for actor.

“Learnt”

Legend has it that when the Harry Potter books were published in the United States, all of the Britishisms were removed with a few exceptions that were deemed essential to the books’ identity, such as ginger, used to describe Ron Weasley’s hair. I wonder the extent to which such translation is generally undertaken. I would imagine it’s routinely done in matters of spelling, as programme, centre, and such would be jarring to American eyes, whereas vocabulary, especially in dialogue, could justly be seen as part of a novel’s flavour flavor.

The actual title of a book would appear to be a special case. A British novel called Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love, by Sarah Butler, has just been published in the U.S., and the fourth in the title word is still spelled Learnt, rather than Learned. That made me curious about the history of the two spellings in the two nations, and so I did a Google Ngrams search for the phrases has learned and has learnt, the results of which are below.

Screen Shot 2013-07-16 at 9.51.54 AMThe chart shows that learned has always been the preferred word in both places, though around 1920, learnt (red line) was briefly as popular as learned (yellow line) in Britain. U.S. learned (blue line) as always kicked the butt of learnt (green line), and unless Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love has Harry Potter-level success, it is likely to continue to do so.

“Chuffed”

John Polk (@ClichesGoneWild) noted on Twitter yesterday, “‘Chuffed’ means pleased… or displeased. Not helpful when a word is its own antonym.”

I was only familiar with the “pleased” meaning but the OED confirms that “displeased” is a legitimate thing, as in this from David Storey’s 1960 “This Sporting Life”: “I felt pretty chuffed with myself.”

I was inevitably prompted me to check chuffed (with either meaning) for NOOB-ness. A quick search of the New York Times archives suggests it deserves On the Radar status, but only in the positive sense (I couldn’t find a single example of the other one).

Most recently, Deb Amlen wrote last month in  Times crossword blog, Wordplay: “I was also pretty chuffed at the beginning because I was able to fill in so many of the long answers.” I’m not 100% sure that Amlen is American, but her online bio confirms residence (and suggests, to me, birth): “She lives in New Jersey with her family and her Extremely Spunky Border Terrier™, Jade.”

The word also appears in a Times article earlier this year about a “adventure design camp” in Texas: “For this camp, Mr. Dyer had made a massive, lusty grill from rusted steel pipe, after a design sketched by the chef Rene Ortiz. It was the first thing he had made besides fence work, and he was pretty chuffed about it.”

For the next Times use (by a non-Commonwealth speaker), you have to go back to a 201o post in the Dealbook blog: “And it seems that Ms. [Cara] Goldenberg does indeed feel chuffed about the meeting [with Warren Buffett].”

What will allow chuffed to rise above the radar? Well, my attention will be caught if I see it used in a U.S. source preceded by one of the customary British modifiers, well or dead. I’m not holding my breath.

Faux Brits, or faux Britishisms?

I’ve been at this too long. That, anyway, was my reaction when I read the following in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine profile of Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, an American who now lives in London:

He uses Britishisms that make him sound a little like the famous faux-Brits Gwyneth Paltrow or Madonna. He told me he had “a good ol’ time” at the Olympics, where he attended beach volleyball and an equestrian event as Boris Johnson’s guest. Living in Marylebone is nice, he says, because “we have loads of friends and people pop by.” Unlike in the United States, where politicians are remote Wikipedia subjects, in Britain he “literally” (pronounced LIT-ruh-lee) knows them.

The passage left me dazed and confused. Is “good ol’ time” a Britishism? Is “pop by”? (Or is the author referring to “loads”?) And what about that pronunciation of “literally”? I associate it with Rob Lowe’s character on “Parks and Recreation,” who is certainly not a Brit, even a faux one.

I wish I could look all that up on Wikipedia, but even that remarkable resource is no help here. So I’ll crowd-source it to you lot. Help?

“Argle bargle” gets love from Scalia

After I published a post about various U.S. uses of argle bargle (“Disputatious argument, bandying of words, wrangling”–OED), a veritable flood of U.K. commenters observed they heard this term rarely if at all, while a variant, argy-bargy, was quite familiar to them.

Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissent to last week’s Supreme Court decision overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act, continued the tradition of Americans using the archaic version, noting:

As I have said, the real rationale of today’s opinion, whatever disappearing trail of its legalistic argle-bargle one chooses to follow, is that DOMA is motivated by “bare … desire to harm.”

Elsewhere in his dissent, Scalia doubled down on his NOOB-itude, writing, “It takes real cheek for today’s majority to assure us, as it is going out the door, that a constitutional requirement to give formal recognition to same-sex marriage is not at issue here.”

Cheeky monkey!

“Go to Ground”

The New York Times’ redoubtable media columnist, David Carr, has provided material for this blog before, and he does so again in today’s paper. Referring to a supposed video of the showing the mayor of Toronto smoking crack, Carr writes, “By then the people who had claimed to have the video had gone to ground.”

My NOOB-dar whirred into action at that phrase gone to ground, with which I was not familiar but which had an unmistakable British sound to it. A look at the OED confirmed the suspicion; but even better, it’s a fox-hunting reference. I had hit some kind of jackpot.

The dictionary dates the phrase to 1797 and defines it as when the fox runs

into a burrow or hole in the ground, ‘to earth’… Also to lie at ground  . to go to ground  : also said of a dog. Also in other phrases, and fig. (of a person), to withdraw from public notice and live quietly or ‘lie low’

All citations are from Commonwealth countries and all  refer foxes or other animals until a 1964 quote (with telltale quotation marks, indicating newness): “The four men ‘went to ground’, probably in Johannesburg.” The expression appears currently to be popular in a sporting context, as in this quote from a 2009 Times rugby article originating in New Zealand: “But on defense, he is less assured and at times puts his team under pressure by offloading when it would be better to go to ground and set up the next phase of play.”

Note that this is different from the American expression “to run [something] into the ground,” meaning to destroy or ruin it by over- or misuse. Someone quoted in 2009 by the N. Y. Times’ Dealbook blog (unclear if he is British or American) seems to have confused the two: “Reuters’s Robert MacMillan argued that by letting the story of The [Boston] Globe’s possible demise leak, The [New York] Times may be betting that a white knight will emerge — ‘someone who fulminates long and hard about civic responsibility and not letting a hallowed journalistic institution go to ground.’”

I’m going to classify the David Carr/fox-hunting go to ground as “on the radar” rather than “outlier” because I found a couple of other uses in the Times in the past several months. Interestingly, they both came from members of the intelligence community, and it makes sense that it would have become popular in a world where people are, frequently, compelled to go to ground. In April, Philip Mudd, “a former senior C.I.A. and F.B.I. official,” referring to a Boston Marathon bombing suspect, said, “He’d get nervous and turn himself in, or he could go to ground.” And in February, Michael R. Shurkin, “a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst,” said, “Are they going to dig in and be guerrillas or go to ground and wait?”

How About “Deft Plank”?

When I pick up the (paper) New York Times, I always turn to page 2 to read the corrections. Since the Times is so obsessive about beating its chest over every error it has made, the record-set-straighting can be amusing. A couple of weeks ago, this classic appeared:

Because of editing errors, an article on Thursday about a duo that has its first Top 10 single and its first No. 1 album on the Billboard album chart misstated its name at two points. As the article correctly noted elsewhere, it is Daft Punk — not Daft Puck or Daft Pink.

The mistakes came about because daft is still on the radar as a NOOB. Presumably, the success of the French musical duo will speed the word’s ascent to full-fledged status.

Hasn’t happened yet, however. On Sunday, I opened up my home-town Philadelphia Inquirer to find this:

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