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We call an old, set-in-his-ways fuddy-duddy a ‘blimpish’ character, and this is a possibly unique example of an eponym that was adopted from an existing name and then reinvented to mean something else entirely.

A blimp is a non-rigid airship, the term first being used in 1915 and supposedly deriving from the noise that was made when someone pushed a finger into the dirigible’s surface. Try poking a balloon and you’ll see why.

When cartoonist David Low of the Evening Standard was looking to satirise the British officer class of the 1930s, he created Colonel Blimp, borrowing the name from the ‘gasbag’ airship. Blimp was old-fashioned, fiercely reactionary and, as Low himself said, ‘a symbol of stupidity’.

The wonderful British film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made a ‘blimp’ slightly more sympathetic, but Winston Churchill still wanted it banned because it showed older officers as frankly doddery. The public lapped it up, however, as they loved Low’s cartoons, and ‘blimpish’ took root and is used to describe someone who is out of touch.