World Wide Words: Blow the gaff

BLOW THE GAFF

[Q] From David Sutton in the UK: What is the gaff in blow the gaff?

[A] Dictionaries give a number of possible sources for this, while others candidly admit they don’t know. I think we can do better than the latter, while having to admit that the matter is clouded by the fog of ages and the poor state of recording of early slang usage. There are all sorts of meanings for the word gaff, something that has added greatly to the confusion.

The standard English sense is of a hooked stick or barbed spear used for landing fish; this comes from the Provençal word gaf for a boat-hook; in French this took on the figurative sense of a blunder, perhaps because the emotional effect of one is like being gaffed, and is the origin also of the standard English word gaffe for an embarrassing remark or blunder. Together with the English dialect gaff for loud and coarse talk, or the same Scots word gaff which meant to talk loudly and merrily, this gave rise at one time to a peculiarly American slang sense of gaff that referred to severe criticism, treatment, or hardship (as in stand the gaff or give the gaff). Then there’s the British slang meaning of gaff for the place where one lives (“come round my gaff for a coffee”), which is almost certainly derived from the use of gaff in the eighteenth-century to mean a fair, and later a cheap music-hall or theatre (as in the famous penny gaff); this probably comes from the Romany word for a town, especially a market town.

(Just as an aside, gaffer, used in British slang to mean the foreman or boss, and in the film industry everywhere for the chief electrician on a production, comes from a shortening of godfather or grandfather — it was at first applied to any old man — and so is a quite distinct word.)

But I would suggest that none of these is the immediate source for blow the gaff. For that, we must look at yet another meaning of the word — a low slang term for some hidden trick or gimmick used as a cheating device in gambling. Originally this was a small hook set in a ring that was used by card-sharps to grip the cards, so the origin is probably in the hook sense of gaff, perhaps augmented by some idea of hooking a sucker. As gaff was also used for the spurs attached to the heels of fighting cocks, and as such pastimes and gambling were intimately associated with fairs, it may be that several literal and figurative slang senses of the word came together in this meaning. (Later, the word developed a sense in America of a fraud or racket.)

And for at least three hundred years the verb to blow has had an informal meaning of informing on, betraying or exposing someone. For example, there was a slang expression around in the eighteenth century, to blow the gab, to betray a secret, in which gab comes from the standard English word for speech or conversation (as in gift of the gab).

What may have happened was that blow the gab became the model for a newer phrase, blow the gaff, under the influence of the cheating trick sense of gaff, where it would at first have meant exposing the trade secrets of gamblers and cheats. It’s then a short step to extend it to the meaning of the older phrase — and indeed to supplant it as the older one went out of fashion.