By Betty Kirkpatrick
Words, like people, can be unpredictable. Take toff, for example. For quite a while it has appeared to be, if not exactly dead and buried, then at least well on its way to oblivion. This would seem understandable. After all, the class-ridden society, where toffs flourished, is supposed to be a thing of the past, especially now we are set to be members of the Big Society and are all in it together.
To be honest, toffs themselves have not actually become things of the past. The word refers to an upper-class or wealthy person, more commonly a man, often one who is particularly well-dressed. There are plenty of these still about. It is the word that has rather faded from the scene.
Now the word toff has made a comeback. It has come to public notice by getting embroiled in the battle surrounding the building of the London–Birmingham high-speed railway. In an advertising poster campaign aimed at the railway’s critics, "southern toffs" are being accused of caring more about their "southern lawns" than they do about jobs for people in the north (well, what else would you expect?), the point being that the railway would bring destruction to the first and benefits to the second.
Toff was originally lower-class slang (when we had a class system) and was probably much more used in the south than further north. First recorded around the middle of the 19th century, the word was mostly used as a term of scorn, disapproval or possibly jealousy. Occasionally it was used as a term of admiration. In this sense, a toff was a man who behaved in a particularly kind or generous way – a gent, in other words.
Like so many words, toff is of uncertain origin. The most accepted theory is that the word is derived from tuft, a slang term once used at Oxford University to refer to undergraduates who were from noble or aristocratic families. The word tuft originally referred to the gold tassel worn on the caps of some of these undergraduates.
Toffs are often presented as behaving in a condescending or supercilious way to those whom they consider to be lesser mortals. In other words, they are toffee-nosed. Whether the two expressions are linguistically related is once again uncertain. Certain it is that you can be toffee-nosed without being a toff.
Betty Kirkpatrick is the former editor of several classic reference books, including Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus. She is also the author of several smaller language reference books, including The Usual Suspects and Other Clichés published by Bloomsbury, and a series of Scots titles, including Scottish Words and Phrases, Scottish Quotations, and Great Scots, published by Crombie Jardine.
Donate to us: support independent, intelligent, in-depth Scottish journalism from just 3p a day
Related posts: