During Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony before the U.S. Senate
Judiciary Committee on 27 Sept. 2018, he claimed that “boofed” – a term from
his 1983 Georgetown Prep senior yearbook (“Have you boofed yet?”) – referred to
farting:
SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE: I don’t know if it’s “boufed”
or “boofed” — how do you pronounce that?
KAVANAUGH: That refers to flatulence. We were 16.
WHITEHOUSE: OK. And so when your friend Mark Judge
said the same — put the same thing in his yearbook page back to you, he had the
same meaning? It was flatulence?
KAVANAUGH: I don’t know what he did, but that’s my
recollection. We want to talk about flatulence at age 16 on a yearbook page,
I’m — I’m game.
Kavanaugh’s definition of “boof” is dubious; in the
1980s it likely referred to anal sex.
A Vox article notes, “It’s very difficult
to find established usage of “boof” in publications of the era, which is
understandable given its risqué apparent definition and that it was slang.” I
did, however, come across the term in Robert Crumb’s XYZ Comics (Kitchen Sink Press, June 1972), where it appears in a bitter
response to his (temporary) loss of the copyright to his famous “Keep on
Truckin’” image. On a page comprising 24 variations of the “Keep on Truckin’”
theme and peppered with 31 copyright notices is a drawing of an ambling man
with the caption, “Keep on Boofin’?”
Whether Crumb appropriated the term from subculture
slang or pulled a nonce word out of his acid-addled brain is anyone’s guess. As
it stands, there is no evidence of a genetic connection between Crumb's and
Kavanaugh’s use of the term, but I’d be interested in learning if the future U.S.
Supreme Court Justice kept a bunch of underground comics under his bed when he
was a teenager.
