Berfrois

Bumf

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by Elif Batuman

My new go-to Kindle drunk-dialing author these days is Anthony Powell, whose twelve-volume A Dance to the Music of Time I cannot over-recommend for those needing to unwind in bed, with or without a drink.  When you finish one volume, you press a button, and there’s a new one right there!  Eleven times!  It’s like the future!  Not to show off, but, the way my memory is going, by the time I get to volume 12 I’ll probably have forgotten what happened in volume 1 anyway, so this could potentially keep me entertained for the rest of my days.

I’m also happy to report that Anthony Powell is improving my vocabulary, as I discovered yesterday when I got an email attachment from my super UK publicist, with the note: “More bumpf from [institution deleted].”

I realized that I knew the meaning of “bumpf,” i.e., pointless paperwork.  But, how did I know?  Was it metempsychosis?  No, it was Anthony Powell.  When I searched for “bumpf” (bumf, bumph) on the Kindle, I got like 14 hits, including this one from Volume 10 (Books Do Furnish a Room):

“I had quite enough of shuffling the bumf round when I was in the army. As a result I’ve developed a positive mania these days against pushing paper.”

As you can see, Powell is really good at conveying the meaning of a potentially unfamiliar word through context clues.  In this way, you can enrich your personal lexicon even when you are drunk and half-asleep.

In honor of my rapidly impending trip to the United Kingdom, I decided to look up bumf in a dictionary.  It turns out to be a contraction for “bum fodder,” originally used to designate toilet paper. Interestingly, the word seems to have retained its literal meaning primarily in China.

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See also here.

Sorry to British readers, who knew all about bumf already!

Piece originally published at My Life and Thoughts | Creative Commons License