Origin of the word “boner”

Etymonline has this:

Meaning "erect penis" is 1950s, from earlier bone-on (1940s), probably a variation (with connection notion of "hardness") of hard-on (1893).

There was an American comic strip that used to run, well into the early 2000s, called "Boner's Ark"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boner's_Ark

Here are some sample strips

I didn't think it was very funny when I read it in the early 70s, and they're not funny today. But this strip ran, with the word "Boner", in major newspapers. So the second meaning of that word must be fairly modern.

The earliest slang dictionary I've been able to find that includes an entry for boner is James Farmer & William Henley, Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present (1890), which has this brief entry:

Boner, subs. (Winchester College).—A sharp blow on the spine.

According to Paul Dickson, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary (1989) another meaning of boner arise in U.S. slang in 1908:

boner 1. n. A dumb play, usually as the result of an error in judgment or lack of concentration as opposed to a mere physical mistake. A boner, for example, might be a base runner taking off on a catchable fly thinking that there are two out when, in fact, there is only one.

2. n. Any stupid move on or off the field. "Bill Sullivan the old White Sox catcher talked to me and told me not to pull no boner by refusing to go where they sent me." (Ring W. Lardner, You Know Me Al; 1916)

USE Historically, this term has not been used lightly in baseball and tends to be reserved for only the most serious gaffes. In its most extreme case—the infamous Merkle Boner [committed by Fred Merkle on September 23, 1908]—it hung on Fred Merkle for the rest of his life. An AP obituary for March 2, 1956, was headlined: "Fred Nerkle, Of 'Boner' Fame, Dies."

ETY[MOLOGY] Quoting Gretchen Lee, from her article "In Sporting Parlance" in the April 1926 issue of American Speech: "The sweet word 'Bonehead' began with ball players, and from it has sprung the useful term 'boner,' meaning an error in judgment."

An Elephind newspaper database search for boner in this baseball-centric sense turns up an earliest match "Merkle's boner" of October 13, 1913, in an untitled item in the [Chicago, Illinois] Day Book:

We hear a whole lot about the high throw of Burns' which allowed a run, and Merkle's boner, which accounted for two, and the experts say that with these plays eliminated the score would have been 1 to 0 in favor of the Giants.

The earliest match that Elephind turns up for "pull a boner" is also baseball related, from "News of the Sporting World," in the Chicago [Illinois] Livestock World (April 30, 1913):

Cincinnati appeared in the the gray traveling suits of the White Sox because Doc Semmens, former trainer for the Cubs, but now acting in the same capacity for the Reds, pulled a boner down in St Louis the previous night. He failed to check the Reds' baggage with all their baseball wearing apparel and when they reached Chicago yesterday they found they had nothing to wear in the game.

And from "'Doc' Gill Recalls Play That Gave Chance's Cubs National League Flag in the Los Angeles [California] Herald (March 30, 1916):

The following story by Dr. Warren Gill explains how the Chicago Cubs came to be prepared for the famous play that produced the "Merkle Incident" and gave the Cubs the championship of the National league. It will be remembered that Merkle pulled a "boner" by not touching second base in a game between the Cubs and the Giants in New York. ... Gill's story was written after he had read Frank Chance's story of "Merkle's Boner" in The Evening Herald of last Tuesday.

As this story indicates, the play involving Merkle was familiarly known in earlier days (dating at least to October 14, 1908) as "the Merkle incident"; "Merkle's boner" was a later popular term for it, perhaps on the strength of Frank Chance's account of it in 1916.

However, the direct antecedent for "pull a boner" seems to have been "pull a bone." From "26,000 Cheer as Cubs Beat Giants" in the Chicago [Illinois] Examiner (June 5, 1911):

The Cubs drew a hopeless blank, and in the second the Giants failed to count, although Zimmerman pulled a bone that was fearful. Devlin had singled when Meyers hit to Zimmy, who attempted to touch Devlin on the line to start a double play. Devlin stopped and Zimmy shot low to first, losing both men.

And from "Fitzgerald's Stupid Play Enables Hilltops to Win," in the [New York] Evening World (June 23, 1911):

It is indeed a lucky kid that can pull a bone and win a ball game.

Harold Wentworth & Stuart Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang (1960) lists only one additional meaning of boner, and it's an old one:

boner n. 1 A mistake; an error or blunder. Has seldom, if ever, been used in U.S. with the Eng[lish] sl[ang] meaning, i.e., a blow with the fist on the lowest vertebra. c1830. Colloq. 2 A diligent student. Some c1900 student use. From "bone."

Wentworth & Flexner's entry for bone asserts that use of bone in the sense of "a diligent student" goes back to circa 1860 and derives "From the Bohn publishing company, publisher of 'Bohn's Classical Library.'"

Although this dictionary dos not include an entry for boner in a sexual sense it does include the following definition of bone:

bone n ... 5 {taboo} The penis, esp. the erect penis.

The earliest slang dictionary I've found that applies that definition to the word boner is Robert Chapman, New Dictionary of American Slang (1986):

boner 1 n fr early 1900s baseball A blunder; error; - BLOOPER, HOWLER 2 n college students A diligent student; = BONE 3 n An erect penis; = HARD-ON: the time you coveted your neighbor's wife. You had a big boner—Stanley Elkin [The Living End (1979)] ...

J.E. Lighter, Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1993) gives an earliest citation for boner in the sense of "erect penis" of 1966:

boner n. 1. BONEHEAD PLAY [First cited occurrence:] 1912 American Mag[azine] (Jun) 200: Boner—a stupid play; a blunder in the science of the game. ...

2. an erection of the penis [First two cited occurrences:] 1966 Fariña Down So Long 283: She caught me with a boner, dammit, bound to stick in her memory, gt her all screwed up. 1968 P. Roth Portnoy 200: Such grave thoughts will cause my "boner" to recede.

The 1966 citation is to Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, and the 1968 citation is of course to Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint. But as with "pull a boner" and "pull a bone," the earlier form of boner in the sexual sense is clearly bone, as Lighter points out in the entry for that term:

bone n. ... 3.a. an erection of the penis. Also bone-on. [First two cited occurrences:] 1916 Cary Venery I21: Bone—An erect penis. A man with an erect penis is said to have a bone. From a raccoon, the male of which has an osseous structure in its organ of generation. 1927 Immortalia 121: He was always there with a bone on.

The temporal distance between Cary's bone and Fariña's boner is 50 years, but there is no reason to suppose that the latter did not derive from the former, just as "pull a boner" had emerged from "pull a bone" in the 1910s. But whereas the baseball boner is grounded in the idea of a bonehead play—the sort of play that someone who had too much bone and not enough brains in his head might be expected to make—the sexual boner seems rather to be connected the notion of "bone-like"—although the argument in Henry Cary, The Slang of Venery (1916) that whoever coined the term was drawing an analogy to a raccoon's penis strikes me as being highly speculative, if not thoroughly fanciful.