boffin

In the slang of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa, boffins are scientists, engineers, and other people engaged in technical or scientific research. The word 'boffin' (or 'boff'—often as an insult^[1]) can also be used to refer to any particularly clever person. The closest American equivalent is "egghead".^[2]

Origin

Originally, armed forces slang for a technician or research scientist.^[2] 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 6-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.

Usage during and after World War II

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:

"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 after 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 labored in secret to create incomprehensible devices of great power. Over time, however, as Britain's high-technology enterprises were eclipsed by their American counterparts, the mystique of the boffin gradually faded. Boffins were relegated, in popular culture, to semi-comic supporting characters such as Q, the fussy armorer-inventor in the James Bond films. The term itself gradually took on a negative connotation, similar to the American slang "geek" or "nerd".

The word has made a few other appearances in literature. There is a family of hobbits with the surname Boffin in the fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien, and William Morris has a man called Boffin meet the newly-arrived time traveler in his novel News from Nowhere.

See also

• Mad scientist

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 (2004)

References

External links

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