Naff

Tacky, tasteless, uncool: a Polari word that went mainstream in Britain; in old gay slang it could also mean straight, as in a naff omi.

Naff means tacky, tasteless, uncool: the wrong curtains, the wrong song, the wrong shoes. A naff party is one you leave early; a naff present goes straight to the charity shop. It is a core word of Polari, the old slang of British gay men, and its most successful export: plenty of British people use it every day without knowing where it comes from.

In gay Polari it had a sharper second edge. Naff could also mean heterosexual: a naff omi was a straight man, literally an unappealing one. The two meanings fit together perfectly. From the point of view of a camp queen in 1960s London, straight and dull were more or less the same thing.

Where it comes from

Nobody knows for sure. Green's Dictionary of Slang lists several candidates: northern English dialect words like naffhead, a simpleton; the Scots nyaff, a contemptible person; and, according to the Polari scholar W.S. Wilcox, the Romani naflo, no good, broken, useless. The most famous explanation, that naff stands for "not available for fucking", is a later joke; Green's records it only from 2003.

What is certain is how it reached the nation. Green's first example is from the BBC radio comedy Round the Horne in 1965, where a country house is dismissed with "Ugh, naph". By 1969 an underground magazine could call bands "pretty naff", and by the 1980s the Sunday papers were explaining that it is naff to name your house Dunroamin'.

Naff off

Naff also became a polite stand-in for fuck. Naff off means get lost, and Green's finds it as early as 1959, in Keith Waterhouse's novel Billy Liar. Its most famous user was royal: Princess Anne was widely reported to have told an irritating photographer to "naff off", and a 1987 memoir by a Fleet Street photographer took Naff Off! as its title. Along the same lines, naffed off means fed up, and naff up means to make a mess of something.

How it is used today

Naff is everywhere in British English, in fashion columns, in football commentary, in family arguments about Christmas decorations. Most people have no idea it once belonged to us. Among gay men it is the same word with a little extra pride: when we call something naff, we are using a word our grandfathers used to survive. A 2010 study of gay slang in the International Journal of Lexicography still lists naff among the Polari words that passed into wider gay usage, next to bona and cousins like zhoosh.

Related terms