Boffins

[Genghis the Engineer]

A book review in the Sunday Times today brought my mind to bear on the subject of Boffins.

When I was an apprentice at RAE, Boffins was an accepted term - they were incredibly bright people, usually with job titles like "Scientific Officer" who lived in worlds of their own, but were very dedicated and whilst you were never quite sure what they were up to, came up with brilliant ideas - like Concorde, carbon-fibre, the jet-engine, ion-thrusters for satellites, and so-on.

Brewers gives the following definition...

A nickname used by the RAF in WW2 for research scientists or "backroom boys". It passed into general use in the 1940s and is said to be from the practice of a certain scientist giving his colleagues Dickensian nicknames, Mr Boffin being a character in "Our Mutual Friend".


I'm sure I remember a different explanation in the front of a copy of Neville Shute's "No Highway" although I can't find it in the front of either of my copies. (Has anybody got a copy with the quote?.)


Alternatively, a 15 year old schoolboy of my current acquaintance has been known to use it (or a derivation, "boffy" - an adjective) as a term of abuse implying that somebody does too much schoolwork and should "get a life".


So I'm just curious, I've certainly used the term to describe myself on occasion, but how common is it still - and what are people's understandings of the term. Is it technically reserved for scientists and not engineers as Brewers seems to suggest? Is it only to be used to the male of the species (and if so, what's the female version of the word)?, and does it only apply to Brits, or are there foreign boffins out there?

:confused:

G

N.B. this is the book that was reviewed in the Sunday Times. (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0571214967/ref=sr_aps_books_1_1/202-4970909-5310208)

[Onan the Clumsy]

We used the word "Keeno" at school do describe the swotty students. It was a derivative of being keen.

Even though the Germans produced such engineering marvels in WWII, it's hard to think of them as having Boffins, so it must be a term for British chaps only. The Americans didn't have any either. They just stole the left over Germans ;)

[Self Loading Freight]

There's an interesting essay on the word at

http://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-bof1.htm

which touches on both the origins and the current playground use of boffin.

"When it first appeared, in Britain during World War Two, boffin was a common colloquial reference to the technical experts, the backroom boys, who were helping to win the war. It was an affectionate term, though tinged with the practical fighting man’s scorn for the academic brain worker. It is claimed that the term arose among researchers who were developing radar, but there’s anecdotal evidence that it was around in the Royal Air Force just before the War as a general term for experts on aviation. However, we also know that—confusingly—it is first recorded, in the Royal Navy, for an “elderly” naval officer (one in his thirties or forties)."

and


"...but for many young people in Britain, it is indeed derogatory, but for a different reason. When it came into fashion among them some 20 years ago, it took on much the same sense that my generation gave to swot, as a disparaging description of someone good at school work—a person acknowledged to be brainy, but inoffensive and definitely not respected."

Interestingly, the youngest recruit in our office (she's 23, you know) uses "spod" in that context. As we're a bunch of technology journalists, she uses it rather a lot. Huh.

R

[BEagle]

'Boffins' are still thought of as being rather 'absent minded professor' types who have flashes of inspiration and then spend hours locked away in 'back rooms' refining their conceptual studies. Probably forgetting to eat or go to bed. They wear lab coats with long-discarded slide rules and the odd pencil or two in the top pocket, have threadbare shirts with frayed, curling collars and flannel ties over which they wear v-necked pullovers full of holes mainly caused by the consequences of trying to light their pipes with bunsen burners... Old corduroy trousers, a different sock for each foot and ancient brogues complete their wardrobes. They speak in Boffinese and will happily scribble on a table cloth with an ancient Conway Stuart fountain pen in obscure Greek symbols, the meaning of which are known only to fellow boffins.....

Whereas 'Engineers' are rather less colourful but certainly more practical and smell of oil and hydraulic fluid. They have hands which bear witness to many a slipped screwdriver or Dzus key occasioned when attempting to turn the boffins' brainwaves into something which actually works.

Or at least, that's how it was. But now there is a third sub-species - the 'software designer'. A pony-tailed geek who lives in a world of computer chassis, patchboards, junk food cartons and styrafoam cups tapping away in some obscure code to develop something totally meaningless - even to boffins!

All have one thing in common - no stick and rudder time! But many of the braver boffins and engineers spent much time trying to understand why the aircrew had so much trouble with their bits of kit - even flying with them on occasion to find out why!

The regard in which aircrew and boffins held each other was always amiable - long may it continue!

[cwatters]

This site has the best reference I could find and quotes Mr Shute...

http://www3.sympatico.ca/drrennie/memoirs.html

Quote:

The following definitions are quoted from the entry in a Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary: (The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary; Volume III: A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary; Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1987.)

"Boffin: [Etym. unknown. Numerous conjectures have been made about the origin of the word but all lack foundation]."

"A person engaged in backroom scientific or technical research. Hence boffin(e)ry, boffins collectively; also the activity of a boffin."

"The term seems to have been first applied by members of the Royal Air Force to scientists working on radar."

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, NoHighway 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, Lord 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 dubbed the scientists affectionately)".

1952 Picture Post 30th Aug. 20/I. Only a backroom boffin out of touch with the classroom could hold this pious belief.

1954 Economist 19th June suppl 6/3. The graduate from research - roughly....the boffin of industry.

1957 R. Watson-Watt Three Steps to Victory xxxiii 20I The proud title of boffin was first conferred on radar scientists by Royal Air force Officers with whom they worked in close cooperation...... I am not quite sure about the true origins of this name of Boffin. It certainly has something to do with an obsolete type of aircraft called the Baffin, something to do with that odd bird the Puffin; I am sure it has nothing at all to do with that first literary Back Room Boy, the claustrophiliac Colonel Boffin.

1958 Times LitSup 14 Feb 83/3 In one of those diverting interludes.....he writes an anatomy of Boffinry.

1958 Economist 25 Oct 298/I "The unexpected success of the boffins' conference at Geneva.... ending in agreement on the feasibility of controlling a nuclear test suspension."

1960 J. Maclaren Ross Until Day viii, 132, "I was engaged in some Boffinry in a blasted back-room unit"

http://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-bof1.htm

also mentions the radar story and that...

"a Nicodemus Boffin is a major character, a “very odd-looking old fellow”, in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend."

[Onan the Clumsy]

Then of course there is the other definition, a verb, an example of which might be.

"I have quite a spring in my step because I'm boffin' my neighbour's wife." ;)