Baffies
It always strikes me as odd when A “guid Scots wird” that I’ve always used and that my family has always used has such poor provenance in the DSL (Dictionary of the Scottish Language).
The most recent of these DSL entries that’s got my birse up is baffies. For the uninitiated, baffies (or baffs) are slippers of the particularly comfy variety — the kind you slip on at the end of the day to lounge about the house in.
Leaving etymology aside for just now, baffs, meaning loose slippers is attested to in 1914; the diminutive baffies is known from 1975, but all of the quotations are from the 1990s and 2000s (the earlier dates are oral collections). Surely one of Scotland’s “100 favourite words” saw more mileage over the last 100 years than the DSL would suggest?
Baffies in text
In the 1950s, The Fife Herald ran a Scots language column called Weekly Letter tae ma Wullie.
Wullie’s ‘Ma’ mentions her baffies on a few occasions:
I’ve got ma auld baffies on an’ there’s a guid fire tae toast ma tootsies at, sae whit mair could I want, eh! (1955)
Paw gied me a braw pair o’ tartan baffies sae I’ll hae no excuse noo for cauld feet! (1951)
Paw might have bought the same baffies that a reporter from the Evening Telegraph found while Christmas shopping in Dundee that year:
If mum has a weakness for baffies, then a nice cosy pair of mules can be purchased for 13s 3d. Should something more elegant be desired, there are many lovely styles in moccasins, brocaded silk, turkish towelling for bath-time — and leather. (1950)
Interestingly, almost all the earlier references that I found are from advertisements from Fife shoemakers or clothiers, and often, baff(ie)s were understood to be distinct from slippers. William Walker of Kirkcaldy touted baffies as excellent stocking-fillers for bairns in 1917:
A year later (1918), Walker had them and children’s house slippers on sale:
This is the oldest reference to the diminutive baffies that I could find, but in 1912, Fairfield Drapery in St Andrews were selling “Children’s baffs from 3½d. Ladies’ baffs from 6½d, as advertised in the St Andrews Citizen.
A heckling letter sent to the editor of the Fifeshire Advertiser, (dated 03/12/1912) from a “Tam Turnip” of Leslie scoffed at the editor’s “tobacco fire in [his] mooth, [and] fur-lined baffs on [his] feet…”
Etymology
So baff(ies) have a century-old history (in Fife at least ) — but why the name? The DSL thinks there might be a connection to bauchle — an old shoe, particularly one that is worn down at the heel that forces the wearer to shuffle or shamble in order to keep them on. The DSL suggests that bauch became baff in dialects where the ch in words like souch, wauch, and thoch are realized as f (souff, wauff, thoff). In Dumfriesshire (1925), bauchles were old worn-out boots with the heels cut off, that were worn by shepherds for “schloofing about the house”. At first blush, this seems like a good match, especially as baffies are generally low-backed so they can be easily slipped on.
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The problem I have with the bauchle-baffie connection is that bauchle was used in Fife at the same time as baff(ie) was. Like bauchle, -auchle words like wauchle, trauchle, sprauchle, fauchle, jauchle, dauchle etc. etc. all imply some sense of discomfort, ungainliness, and undesirability — not qualities you’d look for in your comfy slippers! Baffies might be less formal than moccasins, but nobody is going to buy their wife or children old worn-out slippers for Christmas (nor would they be advertised).
For me, the ultimate origin of baff(ies) is onomatopoeic. The comfy house shoes weren’t the only baffies in (St Andrews) town in the early 20th century. A baffy or baffy-spoon was a golf club used to loft the ball into the air by deliberately scuffing (or baffing) the grass below it. In Scots (and in some dialects of English), to baff something is to give it a soft or flat blow, like with an open palm or a soft ball. Jamieson, in his entry for to bauf (which he equates to baff), describes it as to walk so as to knock one’s shoes against the stones, making a noise.
I think baffies were originally for “baffing” about the house in. Imagine the sound flip-flops (more footwear onomatopoeia) make on a hard floor but softer and shufflier: baff, baff, baff.
If “-auchle” is the stem that connotes stumbling discomfort, then “-aff” is definitely the one that implies a soft impact or movement. Indeed, baff, blaff, claff, flaff, glaff, and waff, all have definitions that involve some sort of light, soft, or flat blows. Another onomatopoeic word in that family, sclaff has all of the same meanings as baff — an openhanded soft blow, a grazing stroke in golf, and… a loose-fitting shoe or slipper! There’s also the reduplicative scliff-sclaff for the sound of a shuffling gait — a word which has now lodged in my brain in a Bobby Darin voice: “Scliff-sclaff I was wearing my baffs / All about a Saturday night.”
Rise of the Baffeez
So how did baffies, a word that seems highly localised to Fife, come to be wide-spread and much beloved in Scotland? It isn’t until after the 1950s that baffs or baffies start to show up in other parts of the country.¹ Enter Baffeez.
In 1949 Arbroath firm Douglas Fraser & Sons exhibited a a jute-soled, leather slip-on shoe that they had been making for 100 years already at a trade fair in London. Known in Dundee and Arbroath as “ropeys”, these comfortable and hard-wearing shoes were already popular with millworkers and housewives.² With a design based on Spanish alpargatas and French espadrilles (inexpensive fibre-soled shoes), Fraser’s “ropeys” attracted international attention at the Olympia trade fair. Ropey meant the same in 1949 as it does now (of poor quality), so Arbroath’s old favourites were rebranded as Baffeez, which according to the Arbroath Herald was “an adaptation of the old Scots word “baffy”, meaning a comfortable shoe”.
By 1957, Douglas Fraser had to modernise their Arbroath factory to meet demand — they were producing over 5000 pairs of Baffeez, in various styles, per week; Baffies or Baffeez, however you spelt it, had become a household name in Scotland and beyond.
Finally, one style that was being made by Douglas Fraser in 1953 was a tartan house shoe — a slipper with a sole tough enough to nip outdoors in. Were these the “tartan baffies” Wullie’s paw bought his ma for Christmas 1950?
So that’s probably way more than you wanted to know about baffies. Thanks for reading. If you know something anything about the history of baff(ies) — gies a shout!
Notes
[1] In his book, The Mither Tongue (1988, pg. 15), Billy Kay mentions that his mother after living in Fife for some time, “brought back to Ayrshire exotic terms such as “baffies” for slippers, or “bocht” for unwell”.
[2] Incidentally, “ropeys” meaning shoes with woven-jute soles is not in the DSL.
