BONER!!!!

I bet boner was only created as a slang for erected penis in the 1980s.

Um, no. I'm not sure when that slang usage first started. However, speaking as someone old enough to remember the 1970s and late 1960s, I can tell you that the term was well established by then.

Also, just because the word was used as a shorter version of "boneheaded maneuver" doesn't necessarily mean that it's not possible that it could have also had the more R-rated meaning at the time (which would obviously never be directly used in a Production Code era movie). Think of all the different contexts / meanings that a word like "screwed" can be used with.

Also, while I don't know specifically about "boner", I've seen accounts of the making of Bringing Up Baby (made the year before this) that talked about one particular scene they that had trouble shooting, required a great many takes to get. The problem was that Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn couldn't keep straight faces doing dialog about putting the bone in the box (in the movie, referring literally a dinosaur bone being packed into a cardboard box for transport / shipping) because of the potential for interpreting it all sexually.

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Boner as slang for a bone-headed move dates from the 1910's. It was originally baseball slang.

Boner having a sexual meaning dates from the fifties. In the forties bone-on was slang, a variation of hard-on, and eventually it was shortened to boner.




Now is the time for guts and guile.

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Geoff is a tough, no - nonsense kinda guy. But in a scene when he is generous and sympathetic enough to give Joe's sister 100 bucks, Dutch says that Geoff doesn't owe Joe anything!

What!!!!!!! I thought Dutch was the one who supposed to be caring and sentimental guy and Geoff was supposed to be the complete opposite! So, what the heck happened!

Dutch then said he would give Joe's sister the two months pay he owed him. He actually didn't owe him this, and couldn't afford it either, but he didn't want Geoff to have to pay.

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"I didn't want to pull a boner in front of you, Geoff." Said the guy with the broken neck.




"'Extremely High Voltage.' Well, I don't need safety gloves, because I'm Homer Sim--" - Frank Grimes

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Slang has usually a longer pedigree than people imagine. Most slang today is the same slang that was used a hundred years ago. Considering that Howard Hawks loved sexual innuendos and double entendres, there's no doubt in my mind the "modern" use of the boner expression meaning having a hard-on was known at the time but perhaps not for the general public, and it was because of that he found it funny to use it.

In "Bringing up Baby" Another Hawks/Grant collaboration, Grant has the first known use of the expression "gay" meaning homosexual/queer instead of gay = happy, and I'm sure that wasn't a coincidence either. Hawks just loved those kinds of sexual word play, and I think he reveled in the fact that he and his crew were in on the in-joke, while most of the general public was not. That's what made his films cool, because you had to be "in" to understand them...

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