Nerf

Nerf (pronounced nurf)

(1) A device, traditionally metal but of late also rubber or plastic, attached to the front or corners of boats or road vehicles for the purpose of absorbing impacts which would otherwise damage the device to which they’re attached.

(2) A slang term in motorsport which describes the (intentional) use of part of a vehicle to nudge another vehicle off its course; used also to describe the almost full-length protective bars used in some forms of dirt-track (speedway) racing (although the term may have be retrospectively applied, based on the use on hot-rods).

(3) As a trademark, the brand name of a number of toys, often modeled on sports equipment but made of foam rubber or other soft substances.

(4) In video gaming, a slang term for reconfigure an existing character or weapon, rendering it less powerful.

(5) By extension from the original use at the front and rear of 1950s hot rod cars and in motorsport, the name adopted (as nerf bar) for a step to ease entry and exit on pickup trucks or sport utility vehicles (SUV) and known also as step rails, step tubes, step bars or truck steps; also sometimes used to describe the extended foot-rests used on some motorcycles.

(6) As "nerf gun", a toy which fires foam darts, arrows, discs, or foam balls; the class is based on the original "Nerf Blaster" by Hasbro.

Circa 1955: Apparently an invention of US (specifically 1950s Californian hot-rod culture) English, the source of the word being speculative.  The later use, in computer-based gaming, etymologists trace (though there is dissent) from the primitive Indo-European mith- (to exchange, remove) from which Latin gained missilis (that may be thrown (in the plural missilia (presents thrown among the people by the emperors)), source (via the seventeenth century Middle French missile (projectile)) of the English missile ((1) in a military context a self-propelled projectile whose trajectory can sometimes be adjusted after it is launched & (2) any object used as a weapon by being thrown or fired through the air, such as stone, arrow or bullet).  Nerf is a noun & verb, nerfed is a verb & adjective and nerfing is a verb; the noun plural is nerfs.

Lindsay Lohan holding Herbie's nerf bar, Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005) premiere, El Capitan Theater, Hollywood, Los Angeles, 19 June 2005.

In the US, nerf bars were often fitted to cars with bumper bars mounted lower than were typically found on domestic vehicles.  What these nerf bars did was provide a low-cost, sacrificial device which would absorb the impact the bodywork would otherwise suffer because the standard bumper would pass under the bumper of whatever was hit in an accident.  On a large scale, the idea was in the 1960s implemented on trucks as the "Mansfield Bar", a (partial) solution to the matter (understood since the 1920s) of cars crashing into the rear of trucks, tending increasingly (as bodywork became lower) to “pass under” the rear of a truck's chassis, meaning it was the passenger compartment (at the windscreen level) which suffered severe damage.  The death toll over the decades was considerable and Jayne Mansfield (1933–1967) the most famous victim, hence the eponymy.  Design rules and regulations began to proliferate only in the late 1960s and remarkably as it must seem in these safety conscious times, in the US it wasn't until the early 1970s that cars were required to be built with standardized bumper-bar heights, front & rear.

The suggested etymology is said to account for the application of nerf to gaming where it means “to cripple, weaken, worsen, deteriorate or debuff” (“debuff” a linguistic novelty attributed to gamers) a character, a weapon, a spell etc.  The idea is apparently derived from the proprietary “Nerf” guns, large-scale (often realized in 1:1) toys which fire extremely soft (and therefore harmless) projectiles (al la missilis from the Latin); the Nerfball in 1970 apparently the first.  It doesn’t however account for the use either in motorsport or on hot-rods but the evidence suggests it was the hot-rod crew who used it first, based on an imperfect echoic, thinking the dirt-track (speedway) drivers using the protective bars running along the outside of the bodywork of their vehicles to nudge other competitors off the track and onto the grass were saying “to nerf” whereas they were actually saying “to turf”.  Because the hot-rods became widely known as part of the novel “youth culture” of the 1950s, the specifics of their slang also sometimes entered the wider vocabulary and the bars of the speedway cars, in an example of back-formation, also became “nerf bars”.

Nerf bars on a hot-rod.

AC Shelby Cobra 427 (replica) with naked nerf bars (top) and a real one with over-riders fitted (bottom).

The ultimate hot-rod was the AC Shelby Cobra (1962-1967) of which fewer than a thousand were made, a number exceeded more than fifty-fold by the replica industry which has flourished since the bulge-bodied original was retired in 1967, looming regulations proving just to onerous economically to comply with.  The first Shelby Cobra street cars used nerf bars as attachment points for chrome over-riders but, as a weight-saving measure, the latter were usually removed when the vehicles were used in competition, leaving the raw nerf bars exposed.  The raw look has become popular with customers of the replica versions and, surprisingly, the authorities in some jurisdictions appear to allow them to be registered in this state for street use.

On production vehicles, what are sometimes mistakenly called nerf bars are actually “bumperettes”, cut-down bumpers which in their more dainty iterations were sometimes little more than a decorative allusion to the weight-saving techniques used on genuine competition cars.  The increasing stringent impact regulations imposed during the 1970s ended the trend but modern engineering techniques have allowed designers to pick up the motif in the twenty-first century.

The concept of nerf bars as used on hot-rods existed long before the term became popular and can be found in depictions of Greek and Roman ships from antiquity and remain a common sight today, either as a specifically-designed product or simply as old car-tyres secured to the side of the hull and used especially on vessels such as tug-boats which need often to be maneuvered in close proximity to others.  The correct admiralty term for these is "fender" (ie in the sense of "fending-off" whatever it is the vessel has hit).  Manufactured usually from rubber, foam or plastic, there are also companion products, “marine fenders”, which are larger and permanently attached to docks on quay walls and other berthing structures.  Much larger than those attached to vessels, they're best thought of as big cushions (which often they resemble).  The construct was fend + er (the suffix added to verbs and used to form an agent noun); fend was from the Middle English fenden (defend, fight, prevent), a shortening of defenden (defend), from the Old French deffendre (which endures in modern French as défendre), from the Latin dēfendō (to ward off), the construct being dē- (of, from) +‎ fendō (hit, thrust), from the primitive Indo-European ghen- (strike, kill).