In my early youth, I once worked as a waiter at Shoney’s for the summer. This is an experience I do not recommend. But it taught me two valuable things: 1) how not to sink into a pile of my own embarrassment while marching around the dining room with my fellow servers and singing the birthday song, “Happy birthday, happy birthday, we’re so glad you came”; and 2) when the cooks ran out of chicken fried steak, they would yell “86 chicken fried steak!” Through the pass.
To “86” something, in restaurant parlance, is to say that it is finished, finished, gone, no longer on the menu. This is the only sense in which I have heard the word used in my entire life.
But according to Wikipedia, which naturally has an entry about this word, two more meanings exist. “86” can also be applied to people the restaurant refuses to serve, and some slang dictionaries say it can refer to murder.
Which brings us to former FBI Director James Comey, Instagram, and a photo of seashells.
86 shells!
In 2025, Comey posted on Instagram an image of seashells arranged in the shape of two numbers: “86 47.”
James Comey’s Seashell Post.
James Comey’s Seashell Post.
Trump, our 47th president, has long harbored a grudge against Comey, going back to Comey’s investigation into Trump’s possible Russian ties. Trump famously fired Comey in 2017 — then, for good measure, fired his prosecutor daughter in 2025.
Trump has been clear for years about his desire to use the power of the federal government to make Comey’s life more difficult, and federal officials in his second term have been willing to follow suit.
Luckily, they’ve also been pretty stupid. Through a series of astonishingly incompetent actions, the administration had already issued its first Comey indictment in Virginia — a loss so big that it even fired Trump’s interim U.S. attorney for Virginia.
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