Beefed it or Biffed It, You Fell Hard

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Josh. I’m calling from Binghamton, New York.

Well, hello, Josh.

Yeah, I had a question. So growing up, we had a whole bunch of things. I was from Western New York, and one of them being beefed it.

We usually used it in terms of when someone fell, like slipped and fall, they would say, oh, they beefed it.

So I was wondering if that was specific to Western New York or if that’s used more broadly, because I haven’t heard it since I’ve moved and all my friends haven’t heard of it before.

So beefed it. Where does that come from?

All right. Yeah, we can help you with that. About when would that be that you would have used that?

When I was growing up. So high school, like 20, 2010, around then.

Okay. So what I’m hearing you say is beefed it. This is maybe B-E-E-F-E-D, like meat beef, right?

Yeah, like meat beefed. Beefed it.

Okay. But you know what I think? I think this is connected to a slang term that is more widespread to biff it, B-I-F-F.

And the reason I think is it’s exactly the same meaning.

And it’s used in like surfing and snowboarding and mountain biking.

And I even find it glossed. That means like used as a equivalent in a small dictionary of snowboarding slang where beef is also said to be another word for biff.

And they call it a wipeout.

And so it looks like Biff and Beef are the same.

Sometimes it’s spelled B-I-F.

So sometimes it can just mean to fail or do badly.

And that is how I first encountered it in the early to mid-1980s where it shows up in campus slang with a sense of failing an exam.

And also it shows up about the same time as a sense of being clumsy.

Somebody who’s beefed it, somebody who has fallen down.

Maybe they tripped and dropped their books.

And not long after, it shows up in surfing to mean getting smacked by a wave or snowboarding to be wiped out or mountain biking.

You have a crash.

So it’s BIF is this use that we see more commonly, B-I-F-F, again and again and again.

And it pops up in casual text.

It pops up in these amateur dictionaries.

And it pops up in these professional dictionaries as well, early 1980s and onward.

Interesting. Yeah. I’m just thinking we do have like there’s like a small skiing hill, snowboarding hill in the area, you know, drive a couple hours, but not like we have a really profound culture around snowboarding.

So I can see that changing from biff to beast.

There’s also a biff in baseball, which means to hit a ball hard, which is way older than that.

And also to biff something just to hit it in general is way older, like by 100 years.

So we’ve long had in slangy English this sense of to biff, meaning to hit, or to hit something hard or to punch it, long before this sense of to biff something, meaning to fall or to crash or to fail, to wipe out, to fall down.

So it’s possible if there’s a relationship there, but it’s hard to know because there’s a little bit of onomatopoeia happening here, right?

Biff kind of sounds like what happens when you fall, particularly on snow.

Well, Josh, I hope this was enough information to make you feel like we connected with your past and with your memories.

Oh, yeah.

More than plenty.

I really wasn’t sure of the whole history there, but it’s pretty plentiful.

Thanks a lot.

Thank you for calling, Josh.

Thanks, bud.

Take care.

Be well.

Yeah, have a good one.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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