What does '86′ mean? Term in Comey's social media post has changed over time.
According to lexicologists, the term '86' began as diner shorthand in the early 20th century.
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'In the '30s and '40s, there were numerical codes used in diners,' said Jesse Sheidlower, an adjunct professor at Columbia University whose specialty is slang. 'Eighty-one is a glass of water, 82 is two glasses of water, 89 is a pretty girl, and 86 means you're out of something.'
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Even today, it is not unusual to see the number 86 on menu chalkboards in the dining room and whiteboards in kitchens.
Slang definitions tend to slide around, though, and terms can mean different things depending on who is using them.
The most common modern usage of '86' is as a verb, meaning to throw out, dismiss or eject. Customers who are tossed out of an establishment for being too drunk, having a history of walking out on the check or generally acting obnoxious, for example, are said to be 86'd.
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And like many slang terms having to do with disappearance, '86' has evolved in some contexts to refer to deliberate elimination. This is the sense noir crime writer James Ellroy meant when he wrote, in his 2021 novel 'Widespread Panic,' 'it all got tangled up, and poor Janey got 86'd.'
'Yes, it can mean 'to murder,'' Sheidlower said. 'But without any very specific indication that that's the intended meaning, you'd never assume that. The notion that Comey was suggesting this is completely preposterous.'
Still, Trump and his top advisers interpreted Comey's post in that light, even though he subsequently asserted that he 'didn't realize some folks associate those numbers with violence' and took down the initial photo.
The pair have a tangled history, dating to Comey's decision in 2017 to announce that the FBI was investigating the 2016 Trump campaign and whether it had colluded with Russia to influence the election. Trump fired him months later.
An inspector general's report later found that Comey had violated department policies with how he handled memos he took of his conversations with Trump before his firing, but he was never charged. Trump also accused Comey of treason.
When Trump learned in 2019 that the Justice Department would not file charges against Comey, he called one aide after another, asking if they agreed with him that Comey should have been prosecuted. Trump became so enraged over that decision, as well as other matters, that he took the TV remote control in his private dining room and threw it at a credenza along a wall, according to reporting in the book 'Confidence Man.'
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In a Fox News interview Friday, Trump still appeared to harbor ill will toward Comey. Criticizing him as a 'dirty cop,' the president accused Comey of having called for his offing.
'He wasn't very competent, but he was competent enough to know what that meant,' Trump said in an excerpt of the Fox News interview that was to be broadcast Friday night. He added: 'He's calling for the assassination of the president.'
In his second Instagram post, Comey said he had assumed the shells spelled out 'a political message.' But Trump administration officials doubled down. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, pointed out during a Fox News interview late Thursday that Comey had spent his entire career prosecuting the kind of mobsters and gangsters who would commonly use '86' in its most deadly sense, as she accused him of 'issuing a hit on President Trump.'
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, wrote on social media that Comey had 'just called for the assassination' of the president, and said that her department and the Secret Service had launched an investigation. In a separate post, Kash Patel, the FBI director, said his agency would 'provide all necessary support.'
'Green's Dictionary of Slang' cites the first definition of '86' as the restaurant usage, and gives 'to kill, murder; to execute judicially' as the second meaning.
'It broadly means unavailability and thus ending,' Sheidlower said, noting that murderous connotations can attach to almost any slang term having to do with disappearance. ''End' itself can be used to mean 'to kill.''
Slippery meanings are an inherent danger of slang, which can mean different things depending on who's using it.
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'There can be ambiguity because what other people think and what you think don't have to match,' Sheidlower said. 'That's the problem with language.'
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