As Christine Blasey Ford's case languished, uncorroborated, many of Kavanaugh's critics settled on the idea that he perjured himself. Particularly, they claimed he lied about the meaning of "boof" and "devil's triangle" in his yearbook.

The certainty among the boofer prescriptivists is unshakable. But there's evidence to the contrary.

First on Devil's Triangle. One recent definition involves a sex threesome. We reviewed three slang dictionaries from the early 1980s, and none of them had this definition.

Meanwhile, four classmates of Kavanaugh's have publicly declared that they played Devil's Triangle, the drinking game, in high school.

"'Devil's Triangle'" was a drinking game we came up with in high school," they write. "It was a variation of the game quarters." The writers say they knew of no sexual meaning.

And what about "boof"? Kavanaugh said it referred to "flatulence." Liberal commentators and younger prep school boys responded in disbelief. They argued that it clearly referred to anal sex, taking alcohol in the anus, or smuggling contraband in said orifice.

We checked slang dictionaries. Not one of them said it was a verb referring to anal sex or anal alcohol intake. The smuggling definition does appear.



The above picture shows an entry from "Cassell's Dictionary of Slang," authored by Jonathon Green. (Photo courtesy of Tim Carney, Siraj Hashmi)

Notably, the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, has a definition from the 1980s "US campus," meaning "puffed out." That makes sense, given the French verb "bouffer," and the puffy hairstyle the "bouffant."

Another definition from the 1980s includes the "heavy bass notes emerging from" a boombox.

Neither of these definitions from a contemporaneous slang dictionary matches Kavanaugh's definition directly, but they're closer to flatulence than they are to the sexual or alcoholic definitions.

In short, there's much more reason to believe Kavanaugh on the meaning of these words than there is to doubt him.