Tuftiness

[vilakins]

From my World Wide Words newsletter:

TUFTHUNTER It was surprising to read this word reportedly used by the critic Robert Hughes this week, in a comment relating to Damien Hirst's exhibition in New York. It means a toady or sycophant, and I would have said it disappeared from the active language in about 1900. A tuft was at one time a slang term for a golden ornamental tassel. It was worn on academic caps at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in place of the usual black one as a mark of status by titled undergraduates, who were themselves called tufts. Wearing the tuft went out of fashion in the 1870s.

I wondered if that was the origin of 'Tufty' Tarrant. Not that he was a toady, more an upper class twit who may have graduated from the SFA with a golden tassel on his mortarboard. Or does it come from something or someone else?

Comments

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

I don't know, but I'm grinning like mad here. 8-)

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I'm tempted to use it as my 'word' for b7friday this week. I had three stabs at my dictionary and they were all depressing and to do with being reprogrammed or dead. Scary.

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

I had three stabs at my dictionary and they were all depressing and to do with being reprogrammed or dead. Scary.

There you go, mutoid fic!

[hafren.livejournal.com]

It may have disappeared from the sctive language, but not for devotees of G M Fraser's Flashman books.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

There's an idea! I really didn't want to write it about Blake or Vila.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Oh, but I devoured those years ago as a teenager! Lovely stuff. I don't remember the word though, probably because it was well before my B7 days. So did it mean a chinless wonder / Hooray Harry type?

[matildabj.livejournal.com]

It apparently is the brain child of Rita d'Orac (now Rita d'Gaspode, where's gaspodex when you need him? I'm sure he'd confirm)

Merely because of his hair. She doesn't like Tarrant and so gave him a nasty nickname. It's as mundane as that.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

That was what I'd assumed--that it was based on his hair--but when I read this, I wondered if there was more to it. Odd how the nickname stuck, then. And I always thought it was rather an affectionate nickname. It doesn't come across as nasty to me.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Good heavens, I'd always assumed it was from the Tufty Club. Tufty was the squirrel frontman of a campaign to teach children about road safety when I was a child, ie late 1960s/early 1970s. There was a club badge (http://www.scarysquirrel.org/tufty/tuftyclub/badge2.gif). And there was always something rather goody-goody about it - I can remember in the early 1980s a friend teasing a fellow student by asking him whether he had been in the Tufty Club. So I thought it referred to Tarrant's Boy Scoutishness.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Ah, kalypso_v you bring back memories--a few years back I went to visit Emma Peel and part of the video programming was a Tufty Club cartoon, with extensive MST3King.

Maybe it was adopted because of the way Tufty Tarrant scans? I mean, if his name were Burroughs it might have been Bushy Burroughs, or Curly Cresswell or whatever.

[hafren.livejournal.com]

Flashy uses it to mean a celeb-chaser, someone who sucks up to the famous.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

In the correct sense, then; I thought he might have used 'tufty'. I probably got the meaning from context and just skipped over the word.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

And being bright-eyed and bushy-tailed! Yes, that make sense.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Now I can't help but think of Burly Blake, Avaricious Avon, Vilified Vila.