TheRegister - like, say Viz - likes its lazy, outdated journalistic stereotypes and tropes.

That's not being critical of them; its their humour, they mimic the crassness and condescension of tabloid journalism, particularly that of the 70s and 80s (even tabloids have moved on).

When you see cliches like boffin, nanny state, egghead etc etc in a HN title, you can be reasonably confident its El Reg.

As soon as I saw this word, I guessed that El Reg was the source.

I was surprised to see it - I thought "boffin" was good-natured but highly irreverent, like "nerd". But I can't imagine any publication writing the headline, "Computer nerd claims Microsoft's supposed quantum leap does not compute."

Completely unrelated but I'm always sad that Umbra, Penumbra and Equinox aren't used very often in day-to-day speech, very cool sounding words.