Monday 20 February 2006

Bonking in Turin

It has been reported that bonking has a new meaning: hitting an object really hard with your snowboard.
Rubbish! This meaning is exactly as old as me, that is to say quite old: the Oxford English Dictionary has it (not specifically referring to snowboards) as the primary meaning of the word, dating it from 1931.
Its secondary meaning, the one which came to your mind when you saw the title of this post, did not develop until much later: its first printed use is recorded by the OED in a quotation from 1975.

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