If you look back at the different spellings of kerfuffle over the years it makes for a bit of a kerfuffle itself. But it does tell a tale.

SPONSOR: GotoMeeting Hold your meetings online for just $49/mo. Try GoToMeeting FREE for 30 days

To start with I’ll define kerfuffle.

The Oxford Dictionary of English says it’s an informal word meaning a “commotion” or “fuss.”

When I first went to look it up I wasn’t sure if it was gerfuffle or kerfuffle and it turns out that this “informal” nature of the word was what led me to this confusion.

According to Michael Quinion at World Wide Words it used to be spelled in all kinds of ways.  He offers curfuffle, carfuffle, cafuffle, cafoufle, and gefuffle.

He says that this range of spellings, used right up to the 1960s, is a sure sign that although many people might be saying the word kerfuffle, so few of them were writing it down it hadn’t had a chance to be documented and its spelling firmed-up in a dictionary.

Even today I see at Merriam Webster Unabridged the barest wisp of an entry. They point to the word stir.

At wordnik* the tally is zero-zero for the American Heritage Dictionary and the Century Dictionary. The word’s not even in those dictionaries.

Where does such a delicious word come from? Think haggis, whiskey, oatmeal, kilts, and golf.

Ach aye laddie, it’s Scots.

The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is only from 1946. But this may have to do with nailing the spelling down because an older word, spelled slightly differently dates from 1583.

It in turn is said to derive from a word first seen 50 years before that, not kerfuffle but simply fuffle; also meaning “to throw into disorder.” The leading ker might have come from Gaelic and would have meant “twisted.”

No one really knows where fuffle came from before that but the thinking is that it’s imitative; it’s reminiscent of ruffle.

But we do know who first wrote down the word fuffle, at least in so far as documents have survived.

Sir David Lyndsay was a poet who lived in Scotland almost a century before William Shakespeare.

At the time Scotland had its own king, separate from England.

That king was James V.

It was James VI who later brought the kingdom under one crown, confusingly becoming James I in England.

But it was James V that David Lyndsay was concerned about and it was in a poem he wrote criticising the king for his sexual exploits that the word fuffle first shows up.

According to Wikipedia James V had at least nine illegitimate children and three of those he fathered while still a teenager.

*John from wordnik commented.