I thought I’d share a few more funny signs for a Monday laugh. Particularly a faded poster on the exterior wall of a Wellington supermarket, 5 metres wide and 4 high.
I didn’t have my camera. ‘Take the photo!’ I urged my wife, who had her phone.
A long standing and recognised profession in New Zealand.
Here in New Zealand a ‘boner’ is a respected profession. These gentlemen, photographed in 1910, were employed to take bones out of carcases. Hence ’boners’. Don’t laugh.
And, as if this wasn’t enough, a howler. In every sense of the word.
Weekly, this sign seems to generate an endless procession of wandering apostrophes…
I suspect the band doesn’t belong to Howler, despite what the sign says.
Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013
The always amazing apostrophes crisscross the globe aimlessly, it seems. It appears they were born to wander…. Great post, Matthew!
Karen
Thank you! It’s amazing how often rogue apostrophes turn up – even, of late, in newspapers, where they shouldn’t. But that’s what happens, I guess, when the experienced subbies go…
Now if the fellows in the New Zealand pic were Scots lifting their kilts, we’d have a very different meaning!
Ewwww! The mental image is just – no! Noooo! Ewwwww!
I have to say, though, that we don’t use the US slang expression at all here. It just doesn’t mean anything to us, other than the profession commemorated on the supermarket wall.
Yeah, it’s scary image. That’s why the Scots did it.
I guess you folk don’t see the humor in our Speaker of the House named, “Boehner.” It’s an unusual name here so folks often pronounce it like “Boner.”
Yeah, the joke’s entirely lost on us here! Actually, the etymology of the word is extremely interesting. According to the 1933 edition of the OED (the edition J R R Tolkien partly wrote) it originated from ‘bonaire’, as in ‘debonaire’, meaning courteous. Later, in both British and American English – it came to mean ‘stupid mistake’, a synonym for the English slang term ‘howler’. The current US slang meaning appears to be pretty recent US. It’s in the Concise OED 11th Edition as an ‘Americanism’. So over not too long a time – maybe 70 years – it’s evolved hugely as a word, and to me that’s pretty neat, really underscores what an amazing and dynamic language English actually is. The profession ‘boner’ in New Zealand appears to be a local neologism, though I guess it’s probably shared in Australia.
Most interesting! Isn’t it curious that we went from Debonaire meaning something like suave to meaning “bad mistake?” Perhaps this was a slight against the wealthy by the lower classes?
The inappropriate use of the apostrophe. Happens all around the world though that’s not a good thing
Quite true! You’d swear that the grammatical rules around apostrophes were as closely guarded a secret as Freemasonry…