Coof is a word meaning an eejit. You'll hear it in parts of Antrim, and it came across the Moyle a long time ago. Ramsay, a fine Scots poet who flourished in 1720, has the line "Let coofs their cash be clinking". Robert Burns wrote cuif. On a poem about drink he "tut-tuts" about the way "fumblin cuifs their dearies slight'.
Some 10 years later, in 1795, Rab spelled the word coof in For a' that: "Tho' hundreds worship at his word, He's but a coof for a' that." Both the Ballymena Observer, an invaluable wordbook published in 1892, and W.H. Patterson's glossary of Down and Antrim words (1880) have the word.
Patterson's glossary is "a lout, an awkward, clownish fellow". In Scotland a coof might also mean a man who interferes with what is women's work; a cotquean, according to one glossary.
Ms Janet Shaw from Belfast sent me the word. She would like to know what its origin is. I don't know. Even the great Oxford hedges its bets here. It says the form corresponds to an earlier cof, which might be identical with Middle English cofe, now cove, slang for a fellow, but the words show little agreement in sense.
It also says identity with Scots coffe, also cofe, coif, merchant, hawker, has been suggested, but here the phonology presents difficulty.
Mr Matt Cullen from Schull, Co Cork, would love to know what his grandfather, who lived in Queensland, Australia, did for a living. His son's birth certificate (1891) says he was a lengthsman, and my correspondent can't find the word in any dictionary.
The obscure Dictionary of Occupational Terms (1921) has it. A lengthman (lengthsman is an isolated form, apparently) was a man appointed to maintain a certain stretch of road or railway in Britain and Australia.
Some lengthmen, as well as maintaining the tracks, looked after the railway gardens that John Betjemen wrote about. Nowadays the British railway companies can't maintain the tracks, let alone the gardens. The word is still in use. A friend of mine has the address "Lengthman's Cottage", in a Dorset village.
Fettler was another Australian word for a length(s)man. To fettle means to maintain, fix. This is an old word, probably from the Old English fetel; if so, the primary sense of the Australian noun fettler would be a man who girds up to do a job.
At any rate, I'm glad to be able to fill in that gap in a family's history.