Numpty noun a foolish person
‘If he were commonly known to be a drunkard, for instance - or criminally dissolute. Or feeble-minded … Christ, was that what Jamie thought of him? A hopeless numpty?’ (The Fiery Cross)
Numpty is such a useful word that it has been adopted by the rest of Britain and has its own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary where it’s given the label ‘British slang, originally Scots’. And numpty is cannily adapting itself to a variety of new environments. Ashley Jensen used the word on the television show Ugly Betty, for example. Like the Scots themselves, Scots words have a habit of stravaigin aboot.
This is not a new phenomenon. Many of the words we take for granted as English words began life in Scotland, being recorded earlier in Scottish sources before they hit the mainstream. Cosy, pony, rampage, guffaw and gumption are all examples of earlier Scots words that raxed (stretched) oot intae the English-speaking world. Writers like Allan Ramsay, Walter Scott and Robert Burns were often instrumental in catapulting them into wider usage and eventual acceptance in Standard English.
The origins of numpty are unclear. It may be an altered form of the word ‘numps’, which dates back to the sixteenth century and also means ‘an idiot’, but this is found mainly in English sources.
Examples in Scots abound, from Matthew Fitt’s Hercules: Bampots and Heroes (2005): ‘And a sleekit plan came intae the king’s heid. “If ah play ma cairds richt here, ah could git rid o this big numpty Hercules wance and for aw.”’ To this from Ian Pattison’s More Rab C Nesbitt Scripts (1992): ‘Yi know, there are times in my life when I feel like the worst wee numpty jobby in the world.’
A further example from the Scotsman expands the form: ‘The numpties remain. Some are so sunk in numptitude that only advanced genetic engineering, and the substitution of chimpanzee cranial parts, could effect a transformation towards more sentient life.’ (March 2003). At that time, we supposed that ‘numptitude’ was a one-off coinage, but no - as we see from this example from the Daily Star (November 2017): ‘Lord Sugar wants the two rival outfits - Team Numptitude and Team Where The Hell Do The Producers Find These People…’