[Ads-l] "Boner" as sexual term versus word for 'big mistake' or 'funny goof-up' =?utf-8?Q?=E2=80=93_?=post-1951?

[Laurence Horn]

“Boner” was the term of art used by my older and/or less innocent friends in the NYC and Long Island suburbs of the mid to late 1950s.  When I’m citing the scathing responses of the Harper Contemporary Dictionary of Usage panel of “experts” to the use of positive “anymore” (e.g. “barbarism”, “unsure immigrant speech”, “illiterate”, “without meaning”, “nonsensical”, etc.), the one from Leo Rosten that characterizes the construction as “silly and probably a boner” still gets giggles from my students, so I suspect taboo avoidance hasn’t yet worn off.

LH    

> On May 10, 2020, at 7:59 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
>> into the 1970s, though it was already pretty rare by then.
> 
> I never heard it till 1969, when a parent quoted it to me as having been
> used by its seven-year-old son. OTOH, I've been familiar with the phrase,
> _on the  bone_ "possessed of a boner," since my own pre-adolescence.
> 
> On Sun, May 10, 2020 at 4:20 AM Stanton McCandlish <smccandlish at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> I'd been aware of the survival of "boner" in the sense of 'an
>> embarrassing error' or 'a laughable mistake', and sometimes a derived usage
>> that seemed to mean something along the lines of 'an over-the-top joke or
>> skit' (i.e. intentional rather than accidental humor), into the 1970s,
>> though it was already pretty rare by then.
>> 
>> This caught my eye:
>> https://screenrant.com/joker-boner-comic-meme/
>> 
>> Short version: a 1951 Batman comic is all about the Joker and a series of
>> his "boner" crimes.  It just overwhelmingly dwells on the word, in panel
>> after panel, in phrasing that looks too double-entrendre to be accidental.
>> I have to wonder whether the penile sense was already established slang by
>> this date, but not permeated enough that censors at the Comics Code
>> Authority would catch it.
>> 
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org