Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:
BUMF
Bless the British for all the words they have given us, not all of which we have been wise enough to adopt on these shores. This week I give you, not merely give you, but press upon you, the splendid monosyllable bumf (pronounced as spelled).
The word means toilet paper, or as I suppose the Brits would say, lavatory paper. It has a rude demotic origin, deriving from bum fodder.
By metaphoric extension, it has come to refer to many kinds of paper, such as pamphlets, official documents, memorandums, and bureaucratic forms. "I shall get a daily pile of bumf from the Ministry of Mines," Evelyn Waugh writes in Scoop.
Monosyllables are particularly well adapted to the expression of quick, curt contempt and dismissal. (Think twit, prat, and git, all precious gifts from Albion.) If you have not already begun, you will soon be assembling drifts of bumf so that you can file your income taxes. Bumf is a word you will want to keep close at hand.
Further example: From Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince's The Sion Revelation: The Truth About the Guardians of Christ's Sacred Bloodline: "On the death of Abbe Berenher Sauniere, on January, 22, 1917, his niece, Mme. James, who lived in Montazels, expressed her resentment [that] she had for her inheritance only '… that old bumf that nobody can read, and a book from the Magazin pittoresque collection, that's all….' "