[Ads-l] More on Kavanaugh yearbook

[Jonathan Lighter]

 Kavanaugh's Yale roommate insists that young K used "devil's triangle" in
a sexual sense on several occasions:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/10/04/i-knew-that-he-knew-he-wasnt-telling-the-truth-former-yale-roommate-says-about-kavanaugh/?utm_term=.3a210057938f

Maggie Haberman of the NYT has allegedly Tweeted that "Urban Dictionary has
the definition of 'boof' that I recall from high school in the 1980s and it
wasn't flatulence, fwiw."  But there's so much Cyrillic script on the page
that I recommend extreme caution:

https://twitter.com/maggienyt/status/1045417547594698753?lang=bg

Newsweek, however, accepts that is was really her:

https://www.newsweek.com/devils-triangle-boofed-mean-brett-kavanaugh-1142748

JL

On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 10:27 PM victor steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> A couple of editors got involved in "sleuthing" of some of the phrases
> found in the yearbook, particularly "boofing" and "Devil's Triangle". One
> makes a bit more sense than the other. (Links below)
>
> Apparently, several grads have claimed that the "drinking game" was
> specifically invented at Georgetown Prep - "invented" being a rather loose
> term, as it was simply an adaptation of another game. It seems a bit
> suspicious but a lot more believable than other claims regarding the
> yearbook entries.
>
> Not so for "boofing". Even ignoring the fact that it's a National Review
> editor trying to exonerate a conservative nominee (typical behavior, as it
> turns out), the support for the claim that "boofing" is "farting" is
> extremely weak. Credit is given to an LATimes editor who said that he heard
> the term used that way at *Georgetown Prep* in the 1990s. Aside from the
> convenience of both terms amounting to private jargon at a small school,
> there's the issue of timeline - the use of "boof" for farting is already
> attested in the 1990s but not in the 80s. So it seems more likely to be
> temporally constrained rather than location constrained. The biggest joke,
> though, is the suggestion in the last graf of the "sleuthing" post - that
> students at an all-male Catholic prep school would have puritan attitudes
> toward sex - or, worse, toward sexually suggestive slang.
>
> VS-)
>
> Devil’s Triangle: The Drinking Game
>
> https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kavanaugh-hearings-devils-triangle-drinking-game/
>
> Sleuthing on Boofing
> https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/brett-kavanaugh-meaning-of-boof/
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org