gaff [ME] One type of gaff is a stick with a metal hook used for landing large fish: it comes from Provençal gaf ‘a hook’. In British slang a gaff can also be someone’s home, a use dating from the 1930s and probably derived from an old term for a fair or music hall. The gaff in ‘blow the gaff’, though, may be linked to an early 19th-century sense, ‘noise or pretence’. Letting out a secret indiscreetly could also be regarded as a gaffe [E20th], an embarrassing blunder or faux pas, which brings us back to metal hooks. In French gaffe means ‘a boat hook’ and, informally, ‘a blunder’, in which sense it came into English in the early 20th century.