Naff

Look up naff in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Naff is British slang. It has several meanings:

Something which is seen to be particularly "cheesy" or "tacky" or in otherwise poor aesthetic taste. An example of a sentence in which it might be used is, "Did you see that Doctor Who repeat on the TV last night? I've never seen such naff sets!". It seems particularly to be used in relation to interior decor, furniture, furnishings, cliched popular artwork, clothing, accessories, and the like. ("That's a naff tie." "That 1970s wallpaper is really naff.")

The word can also be used to describe something that is poorly thought out, doesn't really work, or is otherwise not very good. This usage is similar to that above, but focuses less on aethetics and more on adequacy to the task. An example might be to say of a poor or irrelevant example offered in an argument that, "That's a really naff example." Another example might be to say, "That remote control has a really naff user interface."

A general curse word, which gained widespread usage in the 1970s, when the word was used in the TV series Porridge, in order to get around television censorship at the time. The word was also famously attributed to being used by Princess Anne towards press photographers, in which she is said to have told them to "Naff off". However it is widely thought that she actually told the photographers to "Fuck off", which the press decided to print in this milder form.[1] The verb "naff" can be conjugated and used in the same way as the verb "fuck", in the sense of meaning to go away, as for example in the phrase, "I was in the bar with the guys from work, but after an hour or so Mike and Susie naffed off" (i.e. those two left the bar and went somewhere else).

Heterosexual. The word first gained usage amongst those of the gay subculture in London. Part of the gay polari slang of the 1950s and 1960s, the word was used as a dismissive term towards heterosexuals. It has been suggested that the word Naff is an acronym for "Not Available For Fucking", or "Normal as Fuck". However, they are more likely to be backronyms.