Boffin

They did not know what the bomb was.

They were told only that they had to learn to fly at exactly 60 feet above water at night, at high speed, in absolute formation discipline, To solve the altitude problem, the Boffins devised one of the most elegant engineering solutions of the war.

They mounted two spotlights under each Lancaster, angled so that their beams would converge at exactly 60 feet below the aircraft.

When the two circles of light merged into a single spot on the water, the pilot was at the correct height.

For while his villainy is supposed to be of a dull, mean and bitter sort, quite unlike for instance the uproarious villainy of Quillop, his humour is of the sincere, flowing and lyric character like that of Dick Swiveller or Mr. Micawber.

He tells Mr. Boffin that he will drop into poetry in a friendly way.

He does drop into it in a friendly way, much too really a friendly way to make him convincing as a mere calculating knave.

He and Mr. Venus are such natural and genuine companions that one does not see why, if Venus repents, Wegg should not repent too.

In short, Wegg is a convenience for a plot and not a very good plot at that.

But if he is one of the blots on the business, he is not the principal one.

If the real degradation of Wegg is not very convincing, it is at least immeasurably more convincing than the pretended degradation of Boffin.

The passage in which Boffin appears as a sort of miser and then afterwards explains that he only assumed the character for reasons of his own has something about it highly jerky and unsatisfactory.

It's one of my favorite newspaper words.

Boffin is good.

And blazers.

If I love bungling blazers.

Yeah.

He was a technical guy, the Boffin amp room people-

Yeah

... who I love the most almost.

I studied politics, philosophy, and economics.

So were you, were you a boffin at school?

Boffin.

[laughs] We so use our boffin.

Do you not? I love the word boffin.

It's in loads of books.

There's a family in The Hobbit called the Boffins.

Yeah, it seems to be a really ...

I guess it's quite an ...

What's that show? I don't know it.

Okay, good.

[laughs] Boffins create super what that can survive being run over by a car?

Super rat, someone yelled out in the crowd.

Yeah, uh, bo- de- define boffins.

Boffin, a boffin is like, um... [lips smack] It, it...

So what, what's the best way to describe it? It's like-

Wet sail

This is me favorite.

This is...

What, what is the word? Boffin.

We've got Odd Music here.