Grammar Girl here. I'm Inyan Fokerti and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff. Today, since

Veterans Day is Friday in the United States, we're going to go through some fun words

we got from World War II. And then we'll also talk about how Australians use the phrase

a bit, well, a bit more than other people maybe.

Last year, I did a roundup of words from World War II and it was so popular I decided to

do another one this year. That was episode 849 if you want to go back and listen. First

this week is Bofen. The first use shown in the Oxford English Dictionary was a slang

term in 1941 to refer to an elderly naval officer, elderly, meaning anyone 32 or older.

But a few years later in 1945, it was used to refer to civilian scientists who were working

on radar with the British Royal Air Force, which is where it gets the meaning we think

of today, someone who does innovative or back room scientific or technical research.

The Malvern Radar and Technology History Society has a web page with a collection of newspaper

articles released on Vijay Day, Victory Over Japan Day. Radar was a new development that

likely made the difference in winning the war and the men known as Bofens were celebrated

and admired. For example, an article in the Daily Herald said it should actually be

called Bofens Day. And another article went into great depth about the development of Radar

and said, quote, to the RAF, the mysterious Bofens as the experimenters were called, who

invented and supplied the new devices became almost legendary figures. For none were

quicker to grasp the immense importance of radar than the men who were to use them, unquote.

Nobody knows for sure the origin of the name Bofen. There were multiple fictional characters

named Bofen that predated the war. Charles Dickens, William Morris, and J.R.R. Tolkien all

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