13 Inappropriate Moments That Prove Comics Are Made By Total Perverts

5. The Joker's Boners

When you see reference in older comics to a boner, there's more than a good chance that it doesn't refer to what the term tends to mean nowadays with the misappropriation of the term by guffawing teenagers who made it far more funnier than the old meaning of a mistake that opens the committer to ridicule. The benefit of that change of meaning is that there is a hilarious number of incidences in Batman comics in particular when the phrase is used with reckless abandon, without so much as a concern for what future generations might take the word to mean. Except that's not true. Use of the word boner to mean a blunder certainly comes earliest, as it dates back to around 1912, but the more modern meaning came into use in the 1950s in slang, so it's pretty likely that the writers were wholly aware of the double-meaning, and were playing on it. Laughing at the Joker's boner? That's no accident. And neither could this be...

The boner examples are all over the place, if you look hard enough, and the turns of phrase make it difficult to think that they were anything other than provocatively employed...