[Ads-l] More on Kavanaugh yearbook

[Jonathan Lighter]

>My high-school years were 1950-1954. Life was different, then.

Mine were '62-'66, in a far, far less tony prep school than Georgetown),
and except for some talk about LSD and "pot" in '65 -'66 (and hardly any
use), ditto.  (When a wealthy senior died of a heroin OD at the end of '65,
it was unique, weird, and horrific. We were stunned through and through.)

Tales of drunkenness were rare, and I never saw anybody truly plastered.
Smoking cigs, on the other hand, was extremely cool.

As for sex, if anybody was actually having it, I never heard. (The
exception: a very nice 18-year-old girl forced to leave school in her
senior year, in '65 - because she was married!)

This was in NYC, BTW.

For you whippersnappers out there, society seemed to change utterly between
Watts in '65, the "Summer of Love" in '67 (followed by an attempted
levitation of the Pentagon) and, say, 1972, when Nixon was re-elected in
spite of Watergate.


JL





On Fri, Oct 5, 2018 at 9:18 PM Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> > 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
>


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

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