![]() 2023 New research indicates that the tail clubs on huge armored dinosaurs known as ankylosaurs may have evolved to whack each other rather than deter hungry predators. Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, 13 Mar. Some of them, like Biff and Rocky, crossed over into actual given names before largely falling out of fashion.Verb As usual, Wagner laid out a beating sheet and started to whack at the vegetation. There are a lot of sports nicknames that showed up in that period ("Whitey", "Rocky", "Sparky", "Pop", "Pee Wee", "Kid", etc.) that are no longer common, or at least not as common as they once were. Why it became popular as a nickname in the early to mid-20th Century and not earlier or later, maybe someone else can answer that, but generally speaking, names go in and out of style all the time. It appears to have been extrapolated somewhat beyond a nickname for a pugnacious person, to also describe a person who is tenacious. This is likely where Arthur Miller took the nickname from, too, as the argumentative, athletic ex-football player Biff Loman.Īnd these all agree with a recent baby name book which defines the origin of the name "Biff" with: "ot an ordinary dentist, I hasten to add: not neat and quiet and tactful, but a dentist all the same, even though the larger part of the story is devoted to the chrysalis stage when he was earning and justifying the nickname of Biff." Biff was a working-class neighborhood tough ("a short tempered scrapper" as one online review puts it), while his rival was wealthy and suave. The story is mostly told in flashback, recounting their earlier rivalry. The story is about Biff giving a dental treatment to a man who had been the successful rival for a girl they were both in love with during their youth. The film starred Gary Cooper as a dentist named Lucius Griffith "Biff" Grimes. See what you can do."Ī similar origin is implied in the review of the 1933 film (adapted from a stage play) One Sunday Afternoon, that appeared in Punch magazine. Kollock earned that nickname 'Biff' by bouncing right hooks off opponents' jaws. Try to make him talk but don't get too close. Kollock doesn't like newspapermen, not from papers on our side of the political fence, anyway. Ford recounts that the editor had told Scott: Larry Scott, a reporter for the New York Sun newspaper, was assigned by his editor to interview a boxer by the name of Biff Kollock. Direct evidence of this can be found in the 1945 non-fiction book Larry Scott of the Sun by Edward Ford. The nickname "Biff" appears to have been a loan from this previous American slang, used primarily to describe pugnacious types. Green's Dictionary of Slang agrees, citing many more examples. " Biff (Americanism), to give a 'biff in the jaw'." This is first found in Berre & Leland's 1889 Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant, published in Edinburgh: "Biff" also had become a noun, meaning "a blow, whack", according to the OED. Biff! A well-aimed blow.") and Arthur Miller in the 1949 play Death of a Salesman (the central conflict in the play is between Willy Loman, the salesman, and his oldest son Biff, who was a star high school football player who had dropped out before graduating). "When I go to turn, if I don't remember, Bif!-and I'm in to something."Ī couple other well-known authors who used it were D.H Lawrence in his 1934 book Modern Lover ("He.took the poker with satisfaction. Wells used it in 1905 in his book Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul: "I hit him, biff, alongside of his smeller."īy the turn of the century, it was known in the UK. The earliest instance they cite comes from the 1843 book Streaks of Squatter Life, and Far-West Scenes by John S. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "biff" was originally "imitative" slang used as:Īn exclamation uttered when something strikes an object, or a sound imitative of such a blow.
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