h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There is indeed a suitably tortuous and conspiratorial connection...

During much of Charles II's reign several members of the Privy Council (Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale) were reputed to have decided Court policy secretly amongst themselves. This gang was known as the Cabal, on account of a happy concordance between their initials and semantics, which popularized the term in English usage. Ashley went on to be the first Earl of Shaftesbury, and his great-great-great-great-grandson - the seventh Earl - was stepson-in-law to Lord Palmerston who began the first Anglo-Afghan war in 1838, during which Kabul fell. Palmerston used as a pretext some conveniently edited letters from Sir Alexander Burns, who was the British Envoy in Kabul when he wasn't too busy with his other duties as the top-ranking freemason and Knight Templar in the Indian sub-continent.

If I wrote what Mycroft has just written, I'm sure you'd all believe it implicitly.

If you'd written it, it would have had better punctuation.

'Call My Bluff" has a lot to answer for!

May I suggest a quick perusal of a decent encyclopedia before calling my bluff? It would save me all that tedious crowing when I get to prove I was right all along.

I work on the general principle that any sentence containing the word Templar is suspect, but in your case I'm willing to make an exception.

I work on exactly the same basis and included it in spite of its utter irrelevance only because it happens to be true and is guaranteed to foster distrust of the whole.

Isn't it always the way with 'Call My Bluff' - a monkey would guess one in three right, but we poor humans might fare considerably worse!

The reason humans would tend to score less well than monkeys is that we assume we're more intelligent and can out-bluff the other team, while the monkeys know their best strategy is to choose randomly.

Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle!

An unlikely proposition, W , but a quaint expression. On the other hand, if you were actually able to produce said monkey, I think you would have called OUR bluff !

Dear learned people - origins of bluff ? (the geographical feature, the art of fooling people, any other meanings ?)

Two meanings, both from Dutch. Bluff meaning a cliff comes from Dutch blaf, meaning flat. A hill or cliff which presents a flat face.

Bluff meaning pretend from Dutch bluffen meaning to boast.

The third meaning, outspoken in a good-natured way, I don't know the origin.

This has firm pagan origins, and can be traced to later druid beliefs in personal minor deities. Everyone was thought to have their own god, called a Blouffa, who influenced morality, somewhat akin to a conscience. So, if you thought someone was lying to you, you'd challenge by threatening "I'll call your Blouffa!" By the end of the first millennium such beliefs had all but passed away, but the expression remains.

Alternatively ...

The original expression was "to call someone's buff", and was a reference to a custom in North Somerset. If someone was found to be fibbing, they were required to dance naked (in the buff) round the village green twice (once clockwise, and once anti-clockwise) as a punishment.

The word 'buff' got changed to 'bluff' by an Act Of Parliament in 1885, when it started to offend Victorian sensibilities, and in preparation for the forth coming BBC TV program.

And the expression "steady the buffs" refers to the moments when you change direction

That would explain why the film "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was so eagerly anticipated in North Somerset

There is a theory that human intelligence evolved (at least in part) as an arms race between our ability to lie and our ability to detect lies in others. With you lot around our species is going to be evolving fast.

The compassionate pedant in me just wants to make sure everyone realises that 'blind man's buff' is indeed 'buff' (ie: from a soft blow) and not 'bluff'.
This may be obvious to the well educated and those from nations closer to the originating Lowlands, but it's damn near impossible to correct North Americans who insist that the blind man must be bluffing and see no reason to buff the blind.



*waves to Auntie W*

The brutalising pedant in me just wants to make sure that jwf realises that the blind man is not buffed, but is the buffer, and that buff comes does not come from Dutch but the French buffe, from which English also derives buffet in its wind-related sense. If everyone went back to calling the game by its original name - hoodman blind - then these problems wouldn't occur.