boffin

In the slang of the United Kingdom, boffins are scientists, medical doctors, engineers, and other people engaged in technical or scientific research.

Origin

Originally, the word was armed-forces slang for a technician or research scientist.^[1] The origins and etymology of boffin are otherwise obscure. It has been variously proposed that:

• The word comes from a name of a restaurant in East Anglia. From 1938 and during World War II, the British scientists developing radar frequented an eatery called Boffin's.
• Like sigint (signals intelligence), it was a six-character term popularized during WWII derived from "back office intelligence", indicating the origins of a particular item of information.
• It is an alteration of puffin, a bird that is both serious and comical at the same time.
• It was a word for older naval officers (over age thirty-two; see C. Graves, Life Line, 1941) who apparently were termed Boffins in the Royal Navy.
• It was inspired by the Heath Robinson-esque appearance of the Blackburn Baffin aircraft of 1932.
• It was derived from Nicodemus Boffin, a fictional character who appears in Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, a dustman who is described there as a "very odd looking old fellow." This theory was proposed by linguist Eric Partridge.

The word also made a few other appearances in literature prior to World War II. J.R.R. Tolkien used Boffin as a surname for the Boffin family in The Hobbit (1937) and Sergeant Boffin in Mr. Bliss (written circa 1932). William Morris has a man called Boffin meet the newly-arrived time traveler in his novel News from Nowhere (1890).

Usage 1940 – present

During World War II, boffin was applied with some affection to scientists and engineers working on new military technologies. It was particularly associated with the members of the team that worked on radar at Bawdsey Research Station under Sir Robert Watson-Watt, but also with computer scientists like Alan Turing, aeronautical engineers like Barnes Wallis, and their associates. Widespread usage may have been encouraged by the common wartime practice of using substitutes for critical words in war-related conversation, in order to confuse eavesdroppers or spies.

The Oxford English Dictionary quotes use in The Times in September 1945:^[2]

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

The word, and the image of the boffin-hero, were further spread by Nevil Shute's novel No Highway (1948), Paul Brickhill's non-fiction book The Dambusters (1951) and Shute's autobiography Slide Rule (1954). Films of The Small Back Room (1948), No Highway (1951, as No Highway in the Sky), and The Dambusters (1954) also featured boffins as heroes, as did stand-alone films such as The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Sound Barrier (1952).

Boffin continued, in this immediate postwar period, to carry its wartime connotations: a modern-day wizard who laboured in secret to create incomprehensible devices of great power. Over time, however, as Britain's high-technology enterprises became less dominant, the mystique of the boffin gradually faded, and by the 1980s Boffins were relegated, in UK popular culture, to semi-comic supporting characters such as Q, the fussy armourer-inventor in the James Bond films and the term itself gradually took on a slightly negative connotation, broadly similar to the American slang geek or nerd.^{[citation needed][dubious – discuss]} It is also used in the BBC series Sherlock, 'boffin Sherlock Holmes'.

In the Commonwealth outside the UK, the word is much less commonly used - and relatively few Americans will have heard it at all unless via UK sources such as Doctor Who or BBC World.

See also

• Mad scientist
  Boffin

References

Further reading

• Christopher Frayling, Mad, Bad And Dangerous?: The Scientist and the Cinema (2005)
• George Drower, Boats, Boffins and Bowlines: The Stories of Sailing Inventors and Innovations, The History Press (2011)

External links

Online dictionary definitions

• Boffin: World Wide Words entry by Michael Quinion
• "Memoirs of a Boffin" by J. Rennie Whitehead
• Urban Dictionary : Boffin