Boffin

Boffin is a British slang term for a scientist, engineer, or other person engaged in technical or scientific research and development. The World War II conception of boffins as war-winning researchers lends the term a more positive connotation than related terms such as nerd, egghead, geek or spod. A "boffin" was generally viewed by the regular services as odd, quirky or peculiar, though quite bright and essential to helping in the war effort.

This article is about the British slang word for a scientist. For other uses, see Boffin (disambiguation).

Origin

Originally, the word was armed-forces slang for a technician or research scientist.[1][2] In the 12 January 1953 issue of Life magazine, a short article on Malcolm Compston depicts him testing "the Admiralty's new plastic survival suit" in the Arctic Ocean; the article, entitled "Cold Bath for a Boffin", defines the term for its American audience as "civilian scientist working with the British Navy" and notes that his potentially life-saving work demonstrates "why the term 'boffin', which first began as a sailor's expression of joking contempt, has become instead one of affectionate admiration".[3]

The origins and etymology of boffin are otherwise obscure. Linguist Eric Partridge proposed the term derived from Nicodemus Boffin, a character who appears in the novel Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, who is described there as a "very odd-looking old fellow indeed".[4] In the novel, Mr Boffin pursues a late-life education, employing Silas Wegg to teach him to read.[5]

Alternatively, Air Vice-Marshal G.P. Chamberlain, who played a vital part in the use of radar to defeat night-bombers, claimed that 'A Puffin, a bird with a mournful cry, got crossed with a Baffin, a mercifully obsolete Fleet Air Arm aircraft. Their offspring was a Boffin, a bird of astonishingly queer appearance, bursting with weird and sometimes inopportune ideas, but possessed of staggering inventiveness, analytical powers and persistence. Its ideas, like its eggs, were conical and unbreakable. You push the unwanted ones away , and they just roll back.'[1]

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 a hobbit family in The Hobbit (1937) (deriving the name from an Oxford family of bakers and confectioners), and a Sergeant Boffin appears in Mr. Bliss (written around 1932). William Morris has a man called Boffin meet the newly arrived time traveller in his novel News from Nowhere (1890).[4]

Usage

While he didn't use the term 'boffin', Isaac Newton, in his advice to the Admiralty, made an important distinction when he said that 'if, instead of sending observations of seamen to able mathematicians on land, the land would be able to send able mathematicians to sea, it would signify much more to the improvement of navigation and the safety of men's lives and estates on that element.' Lord Haldane - as Secretary of State for War (1905-12) has been credited with laying the foundations for the role of science in defence. [1] In particular, Mervyn O'Gorman inaugurated the use of scientific methods in aeronautical development at the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough, developing a cadre of 'leaders and explorers' who have retrospectively been termed 'boffins'.[6]

During World War II, boffin was applied with some affection to scientists and engineers working on new military technologies, much like Newton's able mathematicians sent to sea. 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 mathematicians like Alan Turing, aeronautical engineers like Barnes Wallis and their associates, and the scientists of the Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development.

Watson-Watt stated that 'the bill of the boffin has two separate functions. One is to poke into other people's business and the other is to puncture 'the more highly coloured and ornate eggs of the "Lesser Back Room Bird", which are quite inappropriate to the military scene.' Henry Tizard has also been regarded as the prototypical boffin. [1] More widespread usage may have been encouraged by the common wartime practice of using substitutes for critical words in war-related conversation, to confuse eavesdroppers or spies.

The Oxford English Dictionary quotes use in The Times in September 1945:[7]

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). John Wyndham's novel The Kraken Wakes includes a song called "The Boffin's Lament" or "The Lay of the Baffled Boffin".

Boffin continued, in this immediate postwar period, to carry its wartime connotations: to some, a modern-day wizard who labours in secret to create incomprehensible devices of great power, to others [1] 'the man (sic) who could understand the viewpoint of the Services, who worked with them, and who frequently shared their dangers'. By the late 60s the term was being used to describe all scientists who had worked at Malvern, irrespective of how closely they worked with the services.[8] A recent example is Richard Vincent, who acquired the nickname 'the boffin' after working at Malvern, which didn't stop him rising to Chief of the Defence Staff. [9] Over time, however, as Britain's high-technology enterprises became less dominant, the mystique of the boffin gradually faded, and the term was often applied to backroom staff. 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.[10] Thus, by the late 1990s, while the need for 'high-calibre' research staff with 'intimate knowledge' of users and their potential needs was well recognized, the term 'boffin' was no longer used in its original sense, lest it conjure up images of 'mad scientists'. [11]

References
  1. Ronald W. Clark, The Rise of the Boffins, Phoenix House, 1962
  2. Chris Roberts, Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind Rhyme, Thorndike Press, 2006 (ISBN 0-7862-8517-6)
  3. "Cold Bath for a Boffin". Life (volume 34, no. 2). Time Inc. 12 January 1953. p. 96. ISSN 0024-3019. Retrieved 19 December 2012.
  4. Morris, Evan (June 2009). "Boffin – Maybe it's a form of "baffling"". word-detective.com. Retrieved 19 December 2012. The most intriguing lead (and to me the most probable source) is literary. The late British etymologist Eric Partridge pointed out that Charles Dickens, in his novel Our Mutual Friend (1865), describes his character Mr. Boffin as "a very odd-looking old fellow indeed," and William Morris, in his News from Nowhere (1891 [sic]), has his own Mr. Boffin, described as a "dustman" (trash collector) interested in mathematics.
  5. Dickens, Charles (2008). Our Mutual Friend. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 50. ISBN 978-0-19-953625-2.
  6. The Earl of Birkenhead, The Prof in Two Worlds: The Official Life of F.A. Lindemann, Viscount Cherwell, Collins, 1961
  7. "boffin, n.". Oxford English Dictionary (Second 1989; online version September 2011 ed.). September 2011 [1989]. First published in A Supplement to the OED I, 1972.
  8. Captain Spencer Freeman CBE, Production under Fire, C J Fallon, 1967
  9. "Field Marshal Lord Vincent obituary", 13 September 2018, The Times
  10. "Who are you calling a boffin?", 24 September 2010, Jenny Rohn, The Guardian
  11. Eds. Robert Bud and Philip Gummett, Cold War Hot Science, Harwood, 1999 ISBN 9057024810

Further reading
  • Robert Hanbury Brown Boffin: a personal story of the early days of radar, radio astronomy and quantum optics, Adam Hilger (1991).
  • Francis Spufford, Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin, Faber and Faber, London (2003), ISBN 0-571-21497-5
  • 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)
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