Callum at UC Irvine grew up with baffies, the family word for rounded, heeled morning slippers, and later found that friends didn’t recognize it. The singular is baffy, and in Scotland baff can mean a bedroom slipper. The word came through Callum’s Scottish great-grandfather, not from bathies, a common reshaping that treats them as bathroom or shower slippers. They’re the loose shoes for that state between bare feet and fully shod. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of ““Baffies” Are Scottish Morning Slippers Worn Before Real Shoes”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Callum calling from UC Irvine.
Hi, Callum. How you doing?
Hey, Callum.
Well, so my word for you guys is baffies.
And baffies are essentially morning slippers, except a very specific kind. Essentially, like, they have very rounded features and they also have a heel for them. So they’re not just like what you might think of as like shower slippers.
Okay, and how are you spelling these?
It’s not quite clear, but it’s like B-A-F-F-Y for the singular form.
F-F as in Frank Frank or S-S as in Sarah Sarah?
S as in Frank and two of them.
Okay.
Baffy.
-huh.
Very good.
And so you use this term and do your friends and family use it as well?
Just my family. I actually thought everybody used it, but I’ve only heard my family use it. Specifically like my dad’s grandfather, which is the first one who I heard use it.
He wouldn’t be from Scotland, would he?
Oh, he is from Scotland.
How’d you know?
Oh, just a guess.
Nice. Interesting. You got right to the heart of it, Martha.
I did.
So he handed that down to you, but nobody around you uses it.
No, no, I’ve not heard anyone use it.
So is it like a somewhat common thing in Scotland?
The word bath, yes, in Scotland, B-A-F-F, means a bedroom slipper.
Wow.
Yeah, and a lot of people misunderstand and call them bathies, B-A-T-H-I-E-S, and they think of them as the slippers that you wear on the way to the bathroom, but they are the shoes that you wear in the morning. Not shower shoes exactly, but, you know, in between barefoot and fully shod.
Yeah, yeah, those loose slippers.
Well, that’s cool. Thank you guys so much.
Yeah, sure, our pleasure.
Happy to help.
Is it catching on with your friends, anybody around you picking it up, or does it just sound childish to them?
I think they just think I’m weird, so that’s okay.
Man, stay weird.
Like they say in Portland, stay weird.
They say it in a lot of places.
That’s fine, dude.
All right, thanks for calling, Colm.
Thank you so much.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
It’s cool, right?
Bath fees.
Picked it up. Third generation, had no idea that it was Scott’s, and here he is with it. Right in his everyday use, just wondering why he feels like an outsider.
Exactly.
And one of those terms you grew up using and you think everybody does. And then you go away to college and everybody’s looking at you like you’re just.
Nice.
You have two heads, right?
How many times have we gotten calls where people say that?
Yeah, I feel like I have two heads because you look at me funny.
There’s no one way, right?
There’s no one lexicon that, I mean, find me two people who speak identically. And they just don’t exist.
Even you now and you a year ago, you’re different.
Yeah, it’s like my skin, right? You shed it every, yeah, interesting.
And so what do you call those slippers?
Do you call them slippers?
I just have slippers, yeah. That’s all they are.
I’m going to start calling them baffies because I love that term.
Yeah, it does sound like bath.
Well, we know you inherited something from your grandparents in the linguistic vein. Share it with us, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.
