I won't be able to pick up the tape today!

oy bummer. I'll leave it out on the porch for whenever you can pick it up.

Yeah, it's just me and Will Baude against the world.

Only the Buffistas could start a Kerfuffle about Kerfuffle.

Huh. I would love to see the OED citation so we could see when and how it was first used.

Huh. I would love to see the OED citation so we could see when and how it was first used.

I bet it was first used in an argument about sheep.

Huh. I would love to see the OED citation so we could see when and how it was first used.

kerfuffle kerfuffle krfA.f'l. Also kafuffle, kufuffle, gefuffle. [Variant of the Scots curfuffle sb. (perh. influenced by ker-?), now the general form in colloquial use. ]

= curfuffle sb.

* 1946 F. Sargeson That Summer 94, I bet it [sc. the domestic row] ended up in a good old kafuffle.

* 1959 J. Fleming Miss Bones xiv. 150 The kerfuffle over the stolen jewels last week.

* 1960 E. W. Hildick Jim Starling & Colonel viii. 62 Butcher said he didn't know what all the kerfuffle was about.

* 1960 A. Wykes Snake Man iii. 38 After this kufuffle was over and we were on our way again.

* 1965 New Statesman 30 Apr. 693/3 After..some abortive backstage kerfuffles at the National Theatre, Wedekind's Spring Awakening has scraped past the Lord Chamberlain.

* 1968 B. Mather Springers xii. 130 In the kerfuffle of the last half hour I had forgotten the poor soul's personal needs.

* 1973 K. Amis Riverside Villas Murder ii. 40 A lot of our readers are going to think all this kerfuffle over an old skeleton being snatched is..a bit of a joke.

Bless!

You will most commonly come across this wonderfully expressive word in Britain and the British Commonwealth countries (though the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer used it in January this year). It is rather informal, though it often appears in newspapers. One of the odder things about it is that it changed its first letter in quite recent times. Up to the 1960s, it was written in all sorts of ways—curfuffle, carfuffle, cafuffle, cafoufle, even gefuffle (a clear indication that its main means of transmission was in speech, being too rarely written down to have established a standard spelling). But in that decade it suddenly became much more popular and settled on the current kerfuffle. Lexicographers suspect the change came in response to the way that a number of imitative words were spelled, like kerplop and kerplunk.

In those cases, the initial ker– adds emphasis, as it does in other words, perhaps onomatopoeic but perhaps also borrowing the first syllable of crash. But we know kerfuffle was originally Scots and it’s thought that its first part came from Scots Gaelic car, to twist or bend. The second bit is more of a puzzle: there is a Scots verb fuffle (now known only in local dialect), to throw into disorder, dishevel, or ruffle. No obvious origin for it is known and experts suspect it was an imitative word. It is probably linked with Scots fuff, to emit puffs of smoke or steam, definitely imitative, which in the late eighteenth century also had a sense of going off in a huff or flying into a temper.

Some specialists think kerfuffle is also related to the Irish cior thual, confusion or disorder. It seems to be a minority opinion, though.

Emphasis mine. I totally use fuffle.

Fuffle seems like a very useful word.

In the kerfuffle of the last half hour I had forgotten the poor soul's personal needs.

Oh, I should put this in my tag bullpen for the next time people get all hot and bothered in Bureaucracy.

Only the Buffistas could start a Kerfuffle about Kerfuffle.

Not on LJ, are you?