[Ads-l] More on Kavanaugh yearbook

[Wilson Gray]

> students at an all-male Catholic prep school would have puritan attitudes
> toward sex - or, worse, toward sexually suggestive slang.

At the all-male, Catholic, Jesuit prep school that I went to, it was
though there was no such entity as "sex." Neither was there any
sexually-suggestive slang, except for the imprecation, "Do me like a
banana: skin me back and eat me!" And it's not even clear that
fellatio was understood to be sexual activity by high-school children
- I use the term, "children," advisedly - back in that day.

Of course, that phenomenon may have been "temporally constrained," to
borrow Victor's felicitous phrase. My high-school years were
1950-1954. Life was different, then.
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



-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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