Word: boffin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...pity that things did not work out hi England. For Perelman is one of the great nibblers of the mother tongue. In his impeccably cut parodies, words like wattles and dottle, boffin and horripilating are used in ways that have caused two generations of grown men with attache cases to break up in solitary laughter on public transport. But in London, Perelman was removed from the effluvia of his native American id iom and the home-grown idiocies that have produced his best work...