What Is The Origin Of (190)?…
Faffing about
Since I joined the serried and ever-increasing ranks of the baby-boomer retirees I can be accused of spending more and more time faffing about. By this I mean that I spend time on ineffectual activities which don’t really get anywhere. About can be replaced by the adverb around – the sense is the same.
It is very much a colloquial idiom, with very few examples to be found in literature and I had assumed that it was a euphemism for the stronger and to many sensitive ears the unacceptable execration that is the Anglo-Saxon f**k. However, this is not the case and faff as a verb has its own, distinctive etymology, although its precise roots are not certain.
There are two front runners for the prize of being the root of faff. The first contender is the Dutch regional word, maffelen, which meant moving the jaws. It was adopted in Scottish dialect and in the vernacular of certain parts of England to mean, in its intransitive form, to speak indistinctly or to mumble, to move the jaws (and tongue) for no obvious end result. In its transitive form, maffle meant to cause to be confused or bewildered.
There is another contender, faffle, another word to be found in English dialect, which means to stammer or stutter. It is tempting, because of the match of the first syllable, to think that faffle is the root of our phrase but there is no conclusive evidence to prove it and it may just be that faffle is a variant of maffle. It is all very confusing and you could faff about without getting too far in your enquiries. In speech, though, these words had been in use since the 16th century.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded usage of the phrase in print was as recent as 1874 in a book entitled Yorkshire Oddities, Incidents and Strange Events, by Sabine Baring-Gould who filled in his long hours as a clergyman by collecting folk-songs, examples of local folk lore and dialect. He recorded, “t’ clock-maker fizzled an’ faffed aboot her, but nivver did her a farthing’s worth o’good.” Despite the clock-maker’s well-meaning attentions, his attempts to help the woman came to naught, as good an example of the modern usage and meaning of the phrase as you could get.
But a North Yorkshire glossary, dating from 1868, throws up another definition of faffle – “as when a person blows chaff away from corn held in his hands, or the wind when it causes brief puffs of smoke to return down the chimney.” This sense was transported, perhaps literally, to the Antipodes where it appeared in the Australian Journal of 1879. “No, it [a candle] burns quite steadily now; you are right about it faffing about before, because it blew towards my face.”
It may not be straining credulity too much to think that both senses we have uncovered are variants of the same original sense. The spluttering candle or the wind that fails to make good its escape up the chimney or a puff that disturbs a sample of corn held in the hand are examples of things that weren’t meant to happen like that and, by extension, as evidence of their ineffectiveness. Whether there is anything to this or it is just a piece of sophistry, what is clear that the sense of wasting time or acting ineffectually won out.
It is only recently that the phrase has been deemed appropriate for the printed page but it seems to be used with increasing frequency in newspapers, both here and in Australia. A recent notable example was this headline from the Australian Financial Review of 11th March 2016; “Mr Turnbull has to stop faffing around.”
Quite.
