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The Future of the Supreme Court May Hang on the FBI Figuring Out What ‘Boofing’ Means

By Adam Johnson / October 1, 2018

“[Devil’s Triangle] is a drinking game where you just arrange three shots in a triangle and then don’t drink them and just have a threesome w two guys/one girl.”

It may all come down to “boofing.”

Over the weekend, the national news media has been doing little else than scrutinizing over Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Thursday testimony before the Senate Judicial Committee. When it comes to deciding whether he should be appointed to the Supreme Court, it comes down to his word against Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who had accused him of sexually assaulting her three decades ago.


As was discussed in the hearing, Kavanaugh’s high school year book entry — from the days of his acquaintance with Ford — makes a number of references to lewd acts, including “boofing” and the “devil’s triangle.”

Kavanaugh, seeking to convince the committee that his teenage years were as sexless as Steve Carrell’s ​character in “The 40 Year Old Virgin,” insisted on Thursday that “boofing” refers to flatulence and that “devil’s triangle” to a drinking game. 


But many have challenged his equivocation, saying that both terms actually denote sexual acts. 

This means that, as argued by an op-ed published on Monday on ​Politico piece, getting to the bottom of how these words had been used in Kavanaugh’s high school is crucial to telling not only his libido levels as a teenager, but also whether had had committed perjury.

And many on Twitter aren’t buying Kavanaugh’s explanation.

​​Some outright dismissed the definition as a flimsy excuse to explain away drunken debauchery.

Since Devil’s Triangle wasn’t known as a drinking game before Kavanaugh’s testimony, there were ​efforts made by some to manufacture an ​alternate definition of the phrase by editing its Wikipedia page, a la Orwell’s “1984,” thus making Kavanaugh’s description of Devil’s Triangle retroactively true. The edits were traced back to a US House of Representative IP address.  

Similar to the Wikipedia edits, a recent satirical addition was made to the existing definition page on UrbanDictionary mocking Kavanaugh’s description saying that Devil’s Triangle is a “made up game of quarters with three cups arranged in a triangle. The rules are unknown because the inventor of the game, Brett Kavanaugh, could not explain them under oath.”

​​However, not everyone was convinced that Kavanaugh was being deceptive in his answers to the Senate Judiciary Committee due to the impossibility of absolute certainty. 

​​Others implied that the FBI was wasting their time on this particular investigation when they could be using their resources on more important matters. 

And some just mocked the Politico piece.

​​In any case, since words can hold different meanings for different groups of people, it seems highly unlikely that the ultimate death knell of Kavanaugh’s confirmation proceedings will boil down to semantics.

Adam Johnson is an editorial intern at Pluralist. 

You can reach him on Twitter.

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