Talk:Devil's Triangle

added citation, quotation, from year 2013
Added citation, quotation, from year 2013:

-- Cirt (talk) 00:52, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

RFV discussion: September–December 2018
Rfv-sense: a sexual threesome. This word and boof have been in the news lately in the US (if you don't know why, count yourself lucky). Yesterday I added several new senses to boof, but I couldn't find any durably archived citations for this sense of Devil's Triangle.

If we do find citations, we should try to figure out whether the term just means a threesome or specifically a threesome with two men and one woman. —Granger (talk · contribs) 01:29, 30 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Your boy Equinox created devil's threesome a while ago. Please check your capitalisation. Equinox ◑ 02:31, 30 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks, it's good that we have that entry, and a quick search finds some citations for it. But I can't find citations for any capitalization of Devil's Triangle/Devil's triangle/devil's triangle with this meaning. —Granger (talk · contribs) 02:45, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Yeah, most of what I find is mention's doubting the "Drinking game" story, but I did find one news article that actually used the term. Kiwima (talk) 04:44, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
 * This New York Times fact checking page states that classmates of the Judge said the phrase was regularly used to describe sex between two men and a woman. --Lambiam 09:58, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Here is a quotation, albeit without capitalization:
 * 1915, Wilbur F. Crafts, “Dancing in High Schools”, Journal of Education volume 82, no. 19 (November 25, 1915), p. 510:
 * High school dances are just now especially untimely, for there is a sex madness on the nation, as shown from the increased “suggestiveness” of dance and drama and song and dress and magazines,—the latter now so reeking with stories strung on the devil’s triangle, “the husband, the wife and the lover,“ that Pittsburgh has felt constrained to appoint a censor for the magazines.
 * --Lambiam 04:41, 1 October 2018 (UTC)
 * There are also a few (very few) cites out there for "map of Tasmania"/"vulva" with inconsistent capitalisation, if anyone cares to pursue it. ←₰-→  Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk)  06:55, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

devil's triangle
An entry for the lowercase form has been created, so I'm adding it to the RFV. It currently has three citations, including the one that Lambiam gave above, but the 1915 quotation looks like it's for a different sense (it sounds to me like it's talking about a love triangle, not a threesome), and the 2018 quotation is a non-durably-archived mention. The 2007 quotation looks good, assuming that it's durably archived. —Granger (talk · contribs) 23:54, 10 October 2018 (UTC)


 * BTW, what about the drinking game sense? Seems like that's a hot sense at the moment. Purplebackpack89 00:31, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
 * All 3 are durably archived mentions. -- Cirt (talk) 00:48, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I've seen mentions, but no uses. —Granger (talk · contribs) 01:24, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Added citations from 2007 and 2013. -- Cirt (talk) 19:30, 15 October 2018 (UTC)
 * The 2013 citation is for the capitalization "Devil's Triangle" (above), and I'm not sure it's durably archived. The 2007 citation looks good, so we need two more. —Granger (talk · contribs) 23:59, 15 October 2018 (UTC)
 * 2013 citation is durably archived. -- Cirt (talk) 00:26, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Could you please explain how you know that? —Granger (talk · contribs) 03:53, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Cosmopolitan‎ is a magazine. It is durably archived via in libraries around the world in multiple locations. -- Cirt (talk) 12:01, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Most publications with web sites have online content that never makes it into their print editions. Chuck Entz (talk) 12:19, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
 * It's also been online since 2013, and has likely been cached elsewhere. -- Cirt (talk) 13:02, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Online caches aren't considered durably archived, as they can disappear pretty easily. Unless we can find evidence that the article in question was published in the print edition of the magazine, we can't consider it durably archived. —Granger (talk · contribs) 13:36, 16 October 2018 (UTC)


 * The content of the 1915 quotation suggests strongly that magazine stories on devil’s triangles, whatever they were, were symptomatic of sex madness and necessitated the institution of censorship. I cannot quite put myself in the 1915 mindset of Dr. Wilbur F. Crafts, Superintendent of the International Reform Bureau, but I doubt that stories on love triangles not involving threesomes, already found in the works of Shakespeare (e.g. Twelfth Night) and an essential plot element in most of Jane Austen’s novels, would have been considered so scandalously appealing to the prurient interest that they justified the institution of censorship. --Lambiam 20:56, 20 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I think it's clearly describing a love triangle involving adultery, which I'm guessing would have justified censorship in Wilbur F. Crafts' mind. The page you linked says: "Opponents called Wilbur Crafts a reform fanatic. Among many other things, he opposed alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, narcotics, divorce, close dancing, and 'joy rides.'"
 * There's no adultery in the Jane Austen books I've read, and as for Shakespeare—well, Othello considered adultery to be justification for murdering his wife. In any case, I don't know for sure what Crafts meant either, but the "adultery" reading seems more plausible than the "threesome" reading to me. —Granger (talk · contribs) 22:39, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

RFV-passed Kiwima (talk) 04:09, 4 December 2018 (UTC)


 * I don't quite understand what the outcome of the discussion is. It seems to me that we have one good citation of the lowercase form (2007), one citation of a different spelling of the lowercase form used in wordplay so that the meaning isn't completely clear (2018 October 2), one citation of the lowercase form with what appears to be a completely different meaning (1915), and two citations of the uppercase form from the same year (2018 September 27 and 2018 October 1). Is that enough evidence to keep either of the entries? If so, which one? —Granger (talk · contribs) 11:04, 5 December 2018 (UTC)
 * As I see it, we have 3 good cites for the uppercase form (2013, and the second two 2018s - the first 2018 is a mention). On the lower case form, there are two cites (2007 and Oct 2008), but as an alternate form, we usually let this sort of thing squeak by. Kiwima (talk) 19:18, 5 December 2018 (UTC)
 * We don't usually let alternate forms slide with less than three cites—if anything, we've traditionally been less willing to bend the rules for alternate forms than for lemmas. As for the 2013 cite, as far as I can tell no one has provided any evidence that it's durably archived. The October 2 2018 cite is dubious at best IMO, with a different spelling and a meaning that's somewhat unclear since it's using the term as a joke. —Granger (talk · contribs) 23:27, 5 December 2018 (UTC)


 * After thinking about this for a few days, here's my suggestion: we lump the citations to support Devil's Triangle (which has two good citations compared to one for devil's triangle), and delete the lowercase form. —Granger (talk · contribs) 11:55, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Seeing no objections, I'm implementing that suggestion and marking this resolved. —Granger (talk · contribs) 02:33, 17 December 2018 (UTC)