Since 1992
Print and digital marketing
By Barbara McAllister
Word of the Day: Gaffer
Like most industries, filmmaking has a vocabulary all its own. The gaffer seen in the credits of a film or television show refers to the chief electrician responsible for lighting. The foley is the sound artist who adds sound effects to the film like footsteps, explosions, and screeching brakes, named after the inventor of the editing process, Jack Foley. Both sound and lighting in movies and television are their own art form.
The gaffer in TV and movies originally used a gaff to move overhead equipment to control lighting levels in the early days of film. Fishermen will recognize a gaff as a metal hook at the end of a pole used to land fish. “Gaff” is an old Middle English word, possibly Celtic, for a similar hooked tool used in farming. The French added an “e” to gaff so that it became a blunder or social error as in, “It is a huge gaffe to call the queen by her first name.”
“Gaffer” is also sometimes used as an informal name for an old-timer or, particularly in England, a colloquial name for the foreman or boss.
Each of the variations supposedly traces back to the original meaning of the word as a hooked tool and probably arose from the gaff’s association with early rural life. So, if Mr. Gaffney, an old-timer who is head electrician at the local TV station, used his hooked pole to pick his teeth at a formal banquet, it would be perfectly logical to say, “The old gaffer Mr. Gaffney committed a gaffe with a gaff.”
