I was much taken by a word used by a northern friend of mine when he was holding forth on the merits, such as they are, of our present rugby squad. `Too much caff in there to beat Scotland', he predicted gloomily.
Caff is a variant of chaff Perhaps I should say that chaff is a variant of caff which is now relegated to dialect status, I'm afraid. Its origin is the Old English caff in places, ceaf. The word was spelled caife in 1330 in Hampole's Psalms: `We sall drife thaim fra vs, as caif fra corne.' Burns, whom I've been re reading lately, had `The cleanest corn that e'er was dight May hae some pyles o' caff in' in his Address to the Unco Guid. My northern friend was using the word in a figurative sense. Any useless or worthless thing could be called caff even if the object in question was a forward about the size of a small steamroller.
Caff is found in Scotland and in the north of England as well. In Yorkshire they have the adjective caffy, useless, mean. In Cornwall caff is refuse, rubbish of any kind, particularly unsaleable fish.
There are some interesting compounds. A caffbed was a bed tick filled with chaff instead of feathers, and caffriddling was a St Mark's Eve custom I wouldn't like to have anything to do with. This old explanation from Yorkshire will tell you why: `The riddle is filled with chaff the scene of operations being the barn floor, with both barn doors being set wide open: the hour is midnight or just before, and each person of The party takes the riddle in succession and riddlus the contents. The appearance of a funeral procession, or of persons bearing a coffin, is a certain augury of death, either to the then riddler himself or someone near to him.'
In parts of west Co Waterford, they have another caff a verb which means to irritate a person by making fun of him. The late Dr Risteard Breatnach of Slieverue and UCD gave me the word. This caff is from the Old French calfer, caufer, whence the modern chauffer, to warm, heat. In dealing with the English and Anglo Irish dialect word gob, mouth, last week I asked if this word comes from the Irish gob, a very old word for snout, beak. A gremlin cut out the important word `perhaps' from my answer. No one knows for sure.