Words: Gaffe

Gaffe

THE GAFFE count is rising. Jeremy Hanley, the new Conservative Party Chairman, seems to make them all the time. Baroness Thatcher, according to the Daily Express, recently committed what its headline called a 'Maggie gaffe' ('Maggie gaffe upsets Major'). Even Gerry Adams, now that he can be treated almost as a normal politician, was accused of a gaffe last week after he had told the Boston Herald that the IRA might eventually return to violence. Being nice and short, gaffe is just the thing for tabloid headlines, and has joined shock, probe, slam, bid and ban in the list of sub-editors' favourites.

What is slightly surprising, however, is to find all these honest English words making room for an import. arrived from France a mere 100 years ago as a piece of modish slang, and could be used as a verb as well as a noun ('I'm afraid I gaffed', or as the French would say, 'j'ai gaffe').

Meanwhile, for some 600 years we have had our own gaff, our word for a hook - and, among other things, for a fair, a shop, a thieves' look-out man, a brothel and a hubbub, as well as a nonsense (a meaning it shares with guff) and a loud outburst of impudent ribaldry (which makes it first cousin to a guffaw, once sometimes spelled gaffaw).

The French for hook is also gaffe, which is where we got this particular meaning. In French slang it might be both a prison warder and, as in English, a look- out man; gaffe a toi is the French for 'watch it'. The etymology of this versatile word is confused, but Larousse seems to think that gaffe, a howler, comes from sailors' slang and is the same word as gaffe, a hook. This makes small sense to me. Our gaff meaning a vulgar outburst owes nothing to the French, and is as English as Yorkshire pud. It is a far more likely ancestor for gaffe meaning 'clanger' than anything that came out of France. We should be spelling it without the 'e' - and the headline-writers could save themselves another letter.