Word: boffin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
What a scientist does outside his laboratory is as absorbing to the global villagers of this electronic age as the personal foibles of the parish priest were to parochial villagers of an earlier time. Thus the biography of J.B.S. Haldane, British geneticist, biochemist, politician and honored boffin,* is doubly interesting. As one of the last great Victorian eccentrics, Haldane carried the belligerent confidence of that era into the conformist corridors of the mid-20th century. As an aristocrat turned Communist, he was a classic caricature of the greathearted scientist who, as social pundit, squanders the fame acquired in one field...
Over the English Channel near Lands End, a Mosquito light bomber climbed to 36,400 feet. Lanky "boffin" (scientific expert) Gerald Bernard Lockee Bayne of the Ministry of Supply touched the bomb-release button, and "Vicky," the Ministry's bomb-airplane-rocket, plunged down through the thin, cold...
...Dublin there was intermittent revolver, rifle and machine gun firing, following an explosion which blew up the entrance of a. cinema theatre. General Boffin (known as the Irish De Wet), one of the irregular leaders, was captured by Free State troops operating from Sligo. ¶The Republicans ambushed a military party at Kyle. Three Free Staters were wounded and four irregulars killed...