Ciaran Bruton from Galway sprung a new word on me this week. “First Max Hastings, now Matthew Parris,” he complained, had been “fumfering about negotiating with Putin”. What could this mean?
Fumfering is an onomatopoeic sort of word, so I could hazard a guess but I’d never come across it before and it doesn’t seem to appear in any mainstream dictionary. Thanks to some online resources — lexico.com, wiktionary.org et al — I now know that to fumfer (or phumpher) can mean any of the following: to waffle, to stutter, to mutter, to temporise, to putter aimlessly or to stall.
Putting aside Ciaran Bruton’s injustice to our distinguished columnists, I’m glad to have been introduced to the word. I wondered, given his address, if fumfer
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