Date:  Wed, 14 Feb 1996 23:37:05 EST

From:  Larry Horn <LHORN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU>

Subject: Re: two questions: boink and fish shan



According to evidence from undergraduate informant judgments and the

campus papers (as of today's Valentine Day issue), the verbs

boink and bonk are both alive and well in the venereal sense at Yale, and of

course bonk retains its innocent meaning too, with the context presumably

disambiguating the bonk in the head from the bonk in, well, you get the idea.

But I've always assumed the New Yorker's "bunk" to which David Bergdahl

refers--



>For the use of "bonk" to refer to bumping into someone/-thing

>cf. the

>NYC usage of "bunk" with the same meaning.



--is indeed a "corruption" (to use the linguistically incorrect term) of

"bump". Can we assume an evolution of the form bump>bunk>bonk, or is this

just a case of convergent development?



--Larry