Firefighters don and doff their equipment, words that derive from “do on” and “do off.” New York City firefighters’ buff-colored uniforms apparently inspired our word buff, as in a fan — a reference to fire enthusiasts who would show up in buff-colored coats to watch firefighters at work. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Firefighter Attire”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is AJ. I’m a firefighter out of Bozeman, Montana.
Hi, AJ. Welcome to the show.
How can we help?
Well, for years I’ve been told to don my gear or doff my gear, and I realized that, well, I know what the words mean. I don’t know where they came from or why they are don and doff.
Don and doff. And you use this how? What’s the environment?
In the fire station, as we’re putting on our bunker gear and our SEBAs and getting ready to go onto a call or in trainings, we don our gear. And after the call, when we’re taking everything off, we doff it.
So it’s just like on and off, but with a D in front of it.
Yeah, it’s interesting. They come from on and off. They originally were both do on, is two words, D-O space O-N, and do off, D-O space O-F-F. And then over time, they just kind of turned into a contraction without an apostrophe. So we say don and doff now.
And what’s interesting about this is the do actually didn’t mean make. It meant more of put. So you were putting on your gear when you were donning your gear. We never use, at least in American English, to put off our clothes, but it also basically meant to put off your clothes as well.
You used an expression that I learned when I was doing some linguistic research, your bunker gear.
That’s your turnout gear, right?
That’s our turnout gear, yeah. That’s the heavy-duty stuff that supposedly protects us from the heat and the fire.
And what was the other expression that you mentioned, some kind of acronym?
Contained breathing apparatus. It’s just like a scuba, but you drop the underwater part. So instead of scuba, it’s S-C-B-A.
There we go. Interesting.
I’ve never heard of that one.
I haven’t either. That’s super cool. You would think it would be SCOBA. It’s designed for the fire and the heat. It’s the exact same thing. It’s our mask and our hoses and our air pack and all the safety equipment that lets us know what we’re running and how hard we’re running.
Cool.
So, AJ, these are words that you don’t use in the rest of your life then?
No, not at all. It’s strictly for the department. It’s lingo in the department.
Huh. That’s very interesting. At Christmas time, do you don your gay apparel?
No.
Well, you know the song, right? Don, we now are gay apparel. It’s the same don.
Yeah, and I would think of doffing your hat to somebody, just lifting your hat. You do off your hat. But I didn’t realize it was more of a technical term for firefighters.
Well, there you go. AJ, thanks so much for your call, and thanks for your work as a fireman. Really appreciate it.
Hey, thanks for answering our questions.
All right. Take care now.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Have a wonderful day.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
One of my favorite fireman-related terms, though, is the word buff.
Yes. And there’s a couple things happening. First of all, buff is the color of your skin, comes from the word buffalo, more or less, and refers to this oxide color. So if you have something other than a pure white, kind of lily white skin, you might have buff-colored skin, right?
But the other thing is the term buff, meaning a fan of something or somebody who’s a real diehard, who’s really into it, comes from the color, the buff color of the New York City firefighter uniforms. Because people who followed them kind of as avid fans would then call themselves after the color of the uniform.
Right. So if you’re a buff, it’s because of the color of the New York City firefighter’s uniform.
Yeah, very cool, right?
Right?
Yeah. Two weird things all related to the term buffalo somehow.
