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

[Barretts Mail]

1. DD cites a use by Stephen Hawking in “Big Bang Theory” on the ADS list (http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2012-May/119223.html <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2012-May/119223.html>).

The episode aired in 2012. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hawking_Excitation <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hawking_Excitation>) specifically mentions this:

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Oliver Sava of The A.V. Club gave the episode a B–. Sava complimented Hawking's line, "it was quite a boner", calling it "the big pay-off of the story" and enjoyed the scene with Bernadette.
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2. I recall being confused by this term in “The Hobbit” (the troll song), but since I don’t enjoy poetry, I didn’t dwell on it. Since the book is now a movie without the song, children will be less likely to stumble on it.

3. HDAS has a citation saying that “boner” was a common term for an erect penis in the 1950s.

4. The UD (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pull%20a%20boner <https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pull%20a%20boner>) cites eigozai.com <http://eigozai.com/>, which is no longer up. I tried finding the original citation on the Wayback Machine but didn’t find it. 

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The expression "to pull a boner" comes from the old American minstrel shows. There was a man in these shows who was called Mr. Bones because he carried two small sticks of bone that he used as an instrument. He was asked questions by one of the other men in the show, just to get stupid but funny answers. This became known as "pulling boners." But in time, the expression, "to pull a boner," meant something more than getting an answer to make you laugh. It meant a bad blunder a mistake that was costly. And a man who pulled such boners was often described as a "bonehead.”
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This sounds like a folk etymology to me.

The OED says that the blunder meaning comes from North American sports < bonehead < bonehead play. Its earliest citation for penis erection is 1936:

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1936   Psychoanalytic Rev. 23 72   In his dream he had a feeling that he was ‘pulling a boner’.
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For the etymology of the penis erection meaning, the OED says “apparently with allusion to _to pull a boner_”.

Surely the similarity of an erect penis and a bone in terms of stiffness must be involved here as well.

Benjamin Barrett (he/his/him)
Formerly of Seattle, WA

> On 10 May 2020, at 08:53, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
> 
> “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.
>>> 


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