boofhead

The story of this word goes back to British English in the 1500s. The British borrowed the French word bouffle meaning ‘a buffalo’ and extended its meaning to cover ‘an idiot’. In particular they had in mind a musclebound idiot resembling the buffalo, big, solid, shaggy and stupid.

They then added –head to it and reshaped the word which gained the form bufflehead by the mid 1600s.  The original buffle hung on in British slang until the 1700s while bufflehead had popularity until the late 1800s.  The first citation for boofhead in Australian English dates back to a Melbourne paper in 1895.

This might have been a minor item of Australian slang but for the appearance in 1941 of the cartoon strip Boofhead by R B. Clark, rated as one of the most popular in Australian history, and continuing until the artist’s death in 1970.  The character Boofhead in this strip was an amiable doofus (idiot) which I think lent colour to the word in later use.

Quite early in the piece in Australia boofhead was shortened to boof from which we derived the adjective boofy, as in boofy boys.  Just to confuse things, there is a dialect word boof (Scottish and Lincolnshire) which also means ‘a musclebound idiot’ so there has been a suggestion that our boof came from that source.  The dialect word may be related but the evidence of the citations is that for us boof followed boofhead.  It did not precede it.

So how do we feel about being called a boofhead?  It is often used with mild force and a degree of humour in relation to children and pet animals. Dogs are often described as silly boofheads, particularly dogs of the boofy rather than the fluffy variety.  Men and boys acquire the nickname when they have a larger sized head than usual. I am not sure where this Australian use comes from. I have examined the cartoon character and his head seems to be in proportion to his body. Perhaps it is just by analogy with blockhead and woodenhead, both of which conjure up a large, hard head and a degree of stupidity.

As with all derogatory terms it can be used with force or with humour. A lot depends on tone of voice and language context.  But boofhead will, I think,  always be a fairly affectionate rebuke, partly because of the lingering memory of Boofhead the amiable idiot, and partly because there is no taboo word in boofhead to give it venom.  It sounds funny and friendly.

Just to show that it is still around, there was an exchange between Daniel Andrews and the South Australians.  Andrews closed the border to South Australia because of concerns about COVID-19, commenting as he did that it was no great loss to Victorians because there was nothing to do in South Australia and Victorians had such great options available to them in their home state. This of course angered the South Australians. The headline was What a boofhead!

Anthony Albanese used boofhead in asking Peter Dutton to sit down while he was speaking, once in 2021, an occasion which inspired the meme and the T-shirt pictured above, and again in 2022.  So boofhead is still working for our politicians, it seems.