I’m going to skip past any detailed rehashing of l’affaire Comey (well, le latest l’affaire Comey), because quite possibly you’ve already heard/read your fill of it (I know I have), beyond noting that I think he’s a disingenuous dipshit who really stepped in it this time, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
Let’s just look at the numbers and whence they came and what they mean.
We can be fairly certain, because smart people have already done the lexicographical legwork for us, that 86 showed up in Our Great American Lingo about a century ago as soda fountain shorthand for “we are out of,” as in “86 the strawberry phosphate.” (The why and how of its specific numerical origin are as murky as that of the venerable “23 skidoo,” but sure, I’m content to be told that 86 is rhyming slang for nix, why not.) I can’t say if this use persists in soda fountains today, should you be able to find a soda fountain, but back in my service days, circa well it was quite a while ago, across an array of fine dining establishments in Chicago and, eventually, New York City, 86 was in active, rollicking use.
Over time, as is the mutable wont of slang—and the mutable wonts of slang are kind of key here, so let’s keep an eye on the concept—86 picked up the additional meaning of “get rid of”/“dispose of”/“show the door to”/“ban,” as in “86 that drunken, bill-skipping mook.”
So far so good, though let’s pause a moment to consider the oft-told story that 86’ing originated via a Greenwich Village bar called Chumley’s, located at 86 Bedford Street, and that, as one writer has written, “When the cops would very kindly call ahead before a raid”—we’re in the Prohibition era, natch—“they’d tell the bartender to ‘86’ his customers, meaning they should exit via the 86 Bedford door, while the police would come to the Pamela Court entrance.” Because, certainly, the NYPD maintained such a kindly, cozy relationship with one and only one such establishment on the entire island of Manhattan, and it couldn’t possibly have been easier or more inevitable for the clandestine concept of 86’ing to spread, presumably by some ur-version of the internet, or perhaps via cigar smoke signals, from one wee isolated West Village speakeasy to a myriad of other speaks, chophouses, and of course soda fountains across this great nation of ours.
And let’s pause yet another moment to consider an origin story I’d not encountered till yesterday, and this one’s a veritable lulu:
The term originated in the soup kitchens of the Great Depression, where the standard pot held 85 cups of soup, so the 86th person was out of luck.
That someone actually wrote out that sentence and encouraged it to be published without ever pausing to think “That is the stupidest for unlawful carnal knowledging thing I’ve ever heard in my life” absolutely boggles what remains of my mind.
OK, getting back to plausible and documented uses of the term—it’s odd to call 86 a term: I mean, it’s a mere duo of digits, but I guess we can call the written-out eighty-six a term—we turn now to the iteration that has caused such grief for former FBI director and Hillary Clinton campaign tanker Jim Comey, who saw seashells by the seashore arranged to read 86 47 and thought nothing of posting a photo of them at Instagram with the caption “Cool shell formation on my beach walk”1—and we get to this (which I have appropriated from my friend Jonathon Green’s invaluable Dictionary of Slang:
Kudos, by the way, or at least one solitary wan kudo, to the person who suggested to me yesterday2 that J[ames]. Ellroy surely meant “deep-sixed” rather than “86’d” and got confused. Ah yes, J[ames]. Ellroy, so notoriously prone to prose confusion.
(By the bye, I’d cite here as well David B. Feinberg’s 1988 novel Eighty-Sixed, in which the term is expanded upon to refer to the slaughter by AIDS, and by the AIDS-indifferent, of great swaths of the gay population.)
Was Comey posting a message—his own or someone else’s—advocating the extermination of the forty-seventh president of the United States? Well, the forty-seventh president of the United States certainly thinks, though I use the term advisedly, so (“A child knows what that meant,” he has declared, no doubt having asked one of his own), as does his apparatchik Tulsi Gabbard, who wants Comey “behind bars,” presumably in our new American fashion of imprisoning people, here or preferably abroad, without the nicety of trying them first, much less finding them guilty of anything, as does right-wing shmegegge Jack Posobiec, who has “no idea why [Comey] hasn’t been arrested yet” and has apparently forgotten that in January 2022 he himself tweeted, at what was then still Twitter, “86 46.”
I of course have no idea what James Comey was thinking. I have no idea whether James Comey was thinking.
And yet, speaking of disingenuousness, as we were, I have been noting a trend of disingenuous, willfully oblivious denial in online posts these last couple of days, an easily disproved, as I’ve just demonstrated, outright insistence that “It doesn’t mean that.” Well, it does mean that.
Too.
🤷🏻♂️
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🙄
And an additional person—so far just the one—who suggested it to me today.
Sallie is grateful as well.
This is (as usual) wonderful.
“… disingenuous dipshit who really stepped in it …”
Just the second sentence—can’t wait for more!