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Toff Tarrant
Further to my post on tufthunters and the tuftiness of Tarrant, I have a little more on the term from this week's World Wide Words newsletter:
TUFTHUNTER Following my note last week about spotting a usage of this obsolete term of rebuke, several people queried the similarity in sense and form between "tuft" and "toff". I might have said that it is commonly believed that the latter term, for a rich or upper-class person, does indeed derive from "tuft".I thought it was relevant to the discussion on one of the B7 lists about whether Tarrant was an Alpha (I think he was).
FWIW I think most of them were Alphas except for Vila (Delta), Gan (Beta or Gamma), and Cally and Soolin who were outside the system. I think Avon may have started as a Beta technician and been promoted to Alpha as he's got the practical skills--unlike Blake--and seems to care a lot more about relative status than the others. [ducks and covers] Don't shoot!