Back in 2012, I alerted readers to the Australian slang word boofy. At the time, I wondered whether a term that seemed to apply to both CK and me—when it should be clear to even the most casual observer that we’re, well…completely different—had any linguistic value whatsoever.
But I hadn’t considered the possible derivations.
Just yesterday, the New South Wales parliament unanimously voted to condemn television personality Eddie McGuire as a “boofhead” for “racist comments.” Set aside for a moment my profound disappointment in seeing Australia, of all places, clutching its pearls over a tenuous claim of racism; I like where this is going. From boofy to boofhead to…? (Help me out, Aussie readers.)
I’ve always thought that we Americans had mastered the art of idiomatic derivation: dumb, dummy, dumbhead, dumbass, dumbsh*t, dumbf—, and so on. I obviously shouldn’t have been so quick to discount a country with venomous trees, drunk feral pigs, and 65,486 Jedi.
