The car - or any car, for that matter - he always called the ‘bouffam’. (In his letters to me he used to spell it ‘bougham’.) ‘I’m going into Newbury in the bouffam.’ he would announce, ‘if anyone wants to come along.’ The word was in common use throughout the family, and I have gone on using it with my own wife and children and anyone else who has become an intimate friend. I always supposed that this, too, was onomatopoeic, imitating the shaking reverberation of a car’s engine when idling, which was general during the early decades of this century.
Origin behind Watership Down’s Hrududu
