Boner? I hardly know her!

“Can you believe they had a character called ‘Beaver Cleaver’ on a wholesome television show?!”

As I self-righteously mocked the naivety of an older generation, it occurred to me that mine also grew up watching a character with a name we’d now consider inappropriate. Andrew Koenig played Richard “Boner” Stabone, best friend to Kirk Cameron’s Mike Seaver, on Growing Pains. Looking at how the show got away with using that nickname offers us a fantastic case study of semantic change.

Boner is attested as early as 1830, when it was used in the UK to refer to body snatchers, but that definition never caught on. Nor did the US definition of boner as a hard-working student—someone who regularly boned up on knowledge.

After the US Civil War, touring minstrel shows became a popular form of entertainment, and a recurring character in these performances was Brudder Bones or Mr. Bones, a slave character played by a white actor in blackface and so named because he carried around bones he used as musical instruments. Mr. Bones was frequently portrayed as a dim-witted buffoon, and “pulling a boner” came to mean “making a mistake,” while “bone-headed” meant “stupid.”

This definition of boner as a blunder or, less frequently, a person responsible for a blunder, persisted even as the word gained a new meaning—the one we’re most familiar with today—that made its way into writing in the 1960s. Interesting that although boner has now become indecorous, its less provocative definition is actually more offensive, in that it was spawned in an era of not-so-casual racism.

A search of the Corpus of Contemporary American English shows that in the mainstream media, the shift from “error” boner to “erection” boner started in the early 1990s, missing Boner’s Growing Pains appearances (1985–1989) by just a couple of years, and really took hold around the mid 1990s.

Some sources had fun with the double entendre as they reported on President Bill Clinton’s “boners,” and by the late 1990s, especially when Viagra was introduced, the “erection” sense of boner had pretty much taken over, with the occasional use of “pull a boner” as a fixed expression. Now boner refers not only literally to erections but also figuratively to obsessions, as in “He has a boner for vintage cars.”

The semantic shift we saw in the 1990s happened quickly—so much so that it’s created a generational divide: many people over 60 will say “What a boner!” to refer to errors or idiots, without erections even crossing their minds (any more than usual). It’s also given us a fun game: interpreting old boner quotes with today’s sensibilities:

“This Government has made about every boner possible.” —Spectator, October 7,1960*

“The chiselers, with no independent means of their own, all made the same boner.” —Jack Lait & Lee Mortimer, USA Confidential, 1952**

“In signing on the dotted line with Florence I had made the boner of a lifetime.” —P.G. Wodehouse, Much Obliged, Jeeves, 1971**

“Lett’s boner helped Miami: If not for Leon Lett’s bonehead play of the year, Miami would have lost its last six games.” —Houston Chronicle, January 9, 1994***

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*From the Oxford English Dictionary
**From Green’s Dictionary of Slang (Thanks to Mister Slang)
***From the Corpus of Contemporary American English