Those sneaky little buggers

The sun was about to come up when I arrived at the office the Monday morning before last, ready to get my week off to a flyer after my computer was re-formatted at end of the previous week because, like me, it was starting to show its age and slowing down to a crawl. And then, nothing seemed to be working properly so I had to read my newspapers – slowly -- to allow time for the IT-boffins to arrive.

As my daughter would sometimes say about the grandchildren’s reactions to certain  things, I suppose my total lack of comprehension of what was happening on my computer’s screen was age appropriate.

I would later be told that my system had apparently been taken over by an army of ugly, sneaky – and decidedly deviant – modern versions of  the big race of fairies, elves, goblins, and trolls which are timeless creations of the distant past.

The sneaky little buggers that were crawling around in the computer, however are said to be a mutation of our modern technological age. They are called gremlins and have been around for less than a centaury.

The term Gremlin came into use during the early 20th century. It would seem that the term arose somewhere in the community of British military pilots and first appeared in print in an April 1929 edition of Aeroplane, published in Malta.

When no other explanation could easily be found for things going wrong, gremlins were blamed for problems on aircraft such as failing components interfering with  the operation of vital systems, altering the equilibrium of aircraft in flight, and in various ways  distracting the aircrew.

Later, gremlins extended their activities into a host of different technologies – from  , bicycles to computers, and many other devices.

Their first golden era came during World War II when the notion of gremlins was disseminated widely through popular culture and the mass media.

They were really put on the map when the famous writer of children’s stories like Charlie and the Chocolat Factory, Roald Dahl, having heard of gremlins during his war service with the RAF wrote The Gremlins. Then the gremlins went to Hollywood with Disney Studios and, as they say in the classics, they never looked back. Their second golden era came with the dominance established by computers that only boffins can truly understand.

Origins of the term

Even the origins of their name is surrounded by some mystery and no-one we could trace could be sure where it came from..

The word seems likely to have been influenced by goblin, but accounts of its origin are varied and none are certain. One source calls in Fremlin beer bottles from an old Kent brewery o explain the word; another the Irish Gaelic word gruaimín, which means an  ill-humoured little fellow.

My vote goes to – probably because it best describes the mood the little sneaky buggers put  me in on the Monday morning before last – the speculation that it is a dialect survival of the Old English word  gremman which means to anger or vex. plus the “-lin” from goblin.

If I have to make  a second choice it would go to the speculation that it comes from the word gruaimin and †he bad-tempered little fellow.

Final word about boffins

If you really want to understand what sort of shadowy world of mystery we live in since we allowed computers -- that only boffins know how to deal with --  to take it over, consider what the Word Detective writes about the origin of the term boffin : “Unfortunately, the origin of the term boffin is a mystery.  Our only consolation is that it is considered a very big mystery by etymologists.

“In fact, boffin was included in a list published in American Speech (the journal of the American Dialect Society) back in 1981 of words with particularly mysterious origins (“Etymology Unknown: Toward a Master List of Words of Obscure Origin”), a list that also included such puzzlers as ‘malarkey’ and ‘moolah’.

“We do know that boffin first appeared in print in Britain during World War II, most often applied to the technical experts working to develop radar (although, strangely, at one point it was also Royal Navy slang for an older officer).  There are only a few theories about the roots of boffin, and most of them are so unlikely that they are not worth repeating.

“The most intriguing lead (and to me the most probable source) is literary.  The late British etymologist Eric Partridge pointed out that Charles Dickens, in his novel Our Mutual Friend (1865), describes his character Mr. Boffin as “a very odd-looking old fellow indeed,” and William Morris, in his News from Nowhere (1891), has his own Mr. Boffin, described as a “dustman” (trash collector) interested in mathematics.  It’s possible that either of these characters inspired the term.  Or, since ‘Boffin’ is an actual surname in Britain, it may have been a real Mr. Boffin working on a war-related technical project who is now lost to memory but immortalised in the slang term boffin.”