Word: boffin
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...hadn't been for Q Branch," the secret service gadget master known simply as Q tells James Bond in 1989's License to Kill, "you'd have been dead long ago." As the fatherly boffin responsible for arming and protecting the British spy since the early 1960s, Q has tinkered with super cars (Bond's amphibious Lotus in The Spy Who Loved Me which came with torpedoes and mines), invented cunning weapons (a key chain in The Living Daylights that used gas to disorientate the enemy, followed by an explosive charge) and regularly came up with ingenious tools (a fake...
...right? Natural? Beautiful? Yes. Race problems are just made up. Even the term is bulls___." She starts talking about the lessons in life she learned from studying social anthropology at Cambridge, then stops herself and laughs. "It's hard to talk about it without sounding like a boffin," she says, using the English slang for egghead...
...author of Crazy Like a Fox and Chicken Inspector No. 23 and the maestro of words such as wattles and dottle, boffin and horripilating was surely up to the challenge. Sidney Joseph Perelman, 74, faced the Chinese author of a drama titled We Will Always Remember Our Beloved Premier Chou En-Lai at a literary luncheon in Peking...
Some officials believe that wave-power machines could conceivably supply all of Britain's electricity needs. Says Alexander Eadie, Britain's Under Secretary for Energy: "Wave power is not just a boffin's pipe-dream. It is a credible proposition." The British government has doubled spending on wave-power research this year, to $5.5 million, and the Japanese have committed $5 million over the next two years. They are betting that these investments could pay off in decades ahead. Oil wells may dry up, but waves will never cease to roll...
...father an amateur inventor. Emett himself has put wires together and lines on paper since early childhood. At 13 he devised a novel gramophone windup mechanism-just as gramophones succumbed to electricity. Undeterred, he became a stellar and sometimes lunar cartoonist. During World War II, some equally dotty boffin at the Air Ministry decided from Emett's complicated cartoons that the artist-a man as mild as Lewis Carroll's Dormouse-should be commandeered to help build nongentle-manly aircraft for the R.A.F...