Etymology of Poof (in the gay way).

Hello Again loyal follower(s). Time for a bit of MacAlaister-style underworld etymology:

A Libyan friend recently told me about a trip to Malta he took a few years ago, here is his story verbatem (translation from the Italian, B.N Sue, Arabic words not translated, in Italics):


"Yeah, Maltese is very similar to Libi. One time I was there with my friend on holidays, and we were walking round and this guy kept following us, an old guy with a hat and smart clothes. So my friend says to me 'Why is that guy following us, is he a cop?'. So I say back to him, 'Don't worry, hada bufta.' Meaning he's homosexual, and the old guy smiles and goes 'Yes, yes, yes, ana bufta!'"


When I heard this I was immediately struck by the similarity to the English word "Poof" (offensive "gay"), and specifically it's variant "poofter", so I decided to look for the etymology of the English word. According to my Collins dictionary, and various on-line sources, the word derives from the French "pouffe" meaning, not illogically "puff", possibly via theatrical slang for a young actor (nowt like stereotypes is there?). The derivative "poofter" was first noted in 1911, in an Australian context.


How proud I was of my countrymen, sowing our deviant oats throughout the mediterranean, and all the way to Australia, buggering our way into the linguistic records of 3 continents. "Bufta" had entered (oo-er!) Maltese and Arabic through brave efforts of Her Majesty's sea-queens. The change in the first letter was easy to explain, Arabic has no "p", so Arabic speakers hear it as "b".


However, something didn't quite ring true. In my youth I was a big fan of Irvine Welsh, particularly his Edinburgh-smack-epic; Trainspotting. One of the most frequently used epithets in that insult-laden tome is "bufty" or its alliterative child "bufty-boy"... meaning, well, "bufta". Why should Scots have the word starting with a "b" if the original French was "p"? Perhaps I had got the direction of the borrowing the wrong way round.


Maybe English wasn't the active partner, but the passive.


I'm now certain that bufta was an Eastern Mediterranean Lingua Franca term, which could have originated from something like "puta" (Vulgar Latin "whore") or Levantine Arabic bufta ("flimsy", "shoddy"). From there it was transported to Britain through the Polari pipe-line (oo-err), where rhotic scots heard it as "bufty", but non-rhotic Cockneys heard the final vowel as schwa you find in "teacher".


So why did we English change the "b" to a "p"? Perhaps the influence of the theatrical slang word "puff", which merged into the new proto-polari "bufter" to form "poofter".


Just goes to show, there's nowt so queer as etymology.






Here's what I think h