Biff

To my children:

Many of you are too young or too intelligent to remember the game Toobin'. Well, it was an arcade game way back in the 80s (the 1980s--I'm not that old!) and soon became a sleeper hit on the NES. Anyway, you played as some schmuck named Biff who floats down the rivers of the world in a tube. You throw beer cans at stuff to get points. Nor can you travel down these rivers with impunity; rather, there're all these shitheads on the shore who shoot stuff at you and try to puncture your tube. A punctured tube kills you, by the way, because I guess Biff never took swimming lessons.

But that's not the point. The point is that our protagonist is named Biff, which got me thinking. What does "Biff" mean? What are its origins? What other famous Biffs are out there, past and present. Is it an abbreviation? Is the full name something like "Biffowski" or "Biffmax?"

So here's the story: According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, "biff" denotes a "whack" or a "blow." It can also be a transitive verb, as in the sentence: "See Dick biff Jane." But how did this onomatopoeic noun/verb become a name. We don't have any "Whack Joneses" or "Blow Smiths," so why do we have "Biffs?"

Biff as a name goes back to one of Jesus' childhood friends (I shit you not, if it's in Wikipedia, then it has to be true: Biff, Jesus' Childhood Pal). Other famous Biffs include Biff Tannen from Back to the Future and Biff Lowman from Death of a Salesman. There's also a Biff comic strip, which is much better than any featured on this site, in England's Guardian newspaper. That's a lot of Biffs!

But the Biff story is full of holes. Man will never know the precise origins of the word. Some say it's Sumerian, for in the Sumerian Book of the Dead there is reference to the pagan god Biffbaba Kuzz Biffbar, the lord of all inner tubes. Others claim that Biff is a Finnish word: Biffjaps, which denotes some sort of pickled oyster dish. These are all interesting theories, but we'll never know for sure whence the word comes. One thing's for sure: Fester's naming his son Biff.