Roald Dahl liked to pretend to be The BFG. If you’re looking for a good insult, squeakpip might do the trick. Some of the words on the list are pongswizzler, scumscrewer, bagblurter, troggy, and schweinwein. Roald Dahl wrote out a full list of potential Gobblefunk words to be used in the book, which can be found at the Roald Dahl Museum. Gobblefunk, the nonsensical language spoken by the giants, featured a lot of playful words like babblement, whizzpopping, and schnozzles. Gobblefunk has over 238 words in its lexicon. Dahl eventually switched the character to a girl named Sophie, named after his granddaughter. In an early manuscript kept in The Roald Dahl Archive, the protagonist was actually a boy named Jody. The main character was almost called “Jody.” Like Sophie, Danny’s father had also witnessed the cloaked giant as he secretly blew dreams into the heads of children. The characters are identical in appearance and ability (think big ears and an even bigger heart). The BFG makes an appearance in another work.īefore the giant was squibbling through his own story, he made a small cameo in an early Dahl work called Danny, the Champion of the World, as a character in one of the bedtime stories that Danny’s father tells him. Four years after its publication, in 1986, the grieving father wrote an open letter encouraging his fellow Britons to get their children vaccinated. He read to her every day until she passed away, and dedicated The BFG to her memory. Vaccines were not yet available and the young girl died at just seven years old. In 1962, Roald Dahl lost his first-born, Olivia, to the measles. He eventually turned the scrawled concept into a full book in 1982. Dahl scribbled down all his thoughts and inspirations in these notebooks to look at later. The BFG comes from Roald Dahl’s ‘Ideas Book.’Īs with many of Dahl’s books, The BFG was born from an Ideas Book. Learn more about Sophie and her adventure in propsposterous Giant Country. The BFG is a whoopsey-splunkers tale about a young orphan girl and her friend, the Big Friendly Giant.

The big friendly giant book