1. Swots, Boffins And Anoraks
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| Image by Ron Mader in Flickr. CC |
Swots are the people who pay attention in class, because they want to, and because they are supposed to. They’re the people who get their homework done on a Friday night, leaving the weekend clear for a trip to the library for further reading. They’re also the people who remember when their friend’s birthdays are without looking at Facebook. They use their free time to learn orchestral instruments and always remember to practice. They’re the people who get all of their Christmas presents sorted by the end of November.
Swot is also a verb. If you’re revising for your exams, you’re swotting. If you need to reawaken on your conversational French before a family holiday to mainland Europe, you can swot up. In this sense, you can act in a swotty way without it being a lifestyle choice or social grouping.
A boffin is pretty much anyone who is into science in quite an intense way and carries this intensity as a defining characteristic of their personality.Professor Stephen Hawking was a boffin. David Attenborough is a boffin. Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, when he’s not dressed in his Flash costume, is a boffin as much as he is a nerd. Hermione Granger, on the other hand, is a swot. So's Emma Watson.
The term anorak refers to anyone who is obsessed with a hobby. An anorak is literally a hooded waterproof coat, and the slang term was originally applied to trainspotters - people whose hobby is hanging around railway stations, monitoring the arrivals and departures of various trains, and writing down their serial numbers in little notebooks; probably because of the rows of sad-looking people standing every weekend and evening in the rain at the train station in their anoraks with their thermos flasks of tea while they tick off the numbers of trains as they go past.
The nearest equivalent non-British slang term might be nerd, meaning a person who has that kind of passionate attachment to detailed knowledge in very specialized areas.
Adapted from: Fraser McAlpine (n.d.) British Nerd Slang. Retrieved January192019, from http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2011/09/frasers-phrases-british-nerd-slang-swots-and-boffins and The Guardian (n.d.). Retrieved January19 2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-19185,00.html
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The word "nerd" first appears in print in 1950 in the children's book If I Ran the Zoo by American children's writer Dr Seuss. In the book, a boy named Gerald McGrew makes a great number of delightfully extravagant claims as to what he would do if he were in charge at the zoo where, he insists, the animals housed there were boring. Among these fanciful schemes is: "And then just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And bring back an IT-KUTCH, a PREEP, and a PROO, A NERKLE, a NERD, and SEERSUCKER, too!"
The accompanying illustration for nerd shows a grumpy Seuss creature with unruly hair and sideburns, wearing a black T-shirt. For whatever reasons, it-kutch, preep, proo and nerkle have never been enshrined in any dictionary.
Read and listen to If I Ran the Zoo:
Video by Funny Fun Time on Youtube
