Funny bones

In one of my classes recently, my non-american-ness was given away by a word I¥d never heard of before: the funny bone. Believing it was just a...well, just some funny bone, I didn’t quite follow the discussion. Flustered, I blurted out that in my native Icelandic we call it a “stupid bone,” as if that made any better sense (somehow your native language always seems to do things right, doesn’t it?). Later, to my relief, I learned that funny bone has the English synonym crazy bone, which comes close to the concept in Icelandic (i.e. vitlausa beinid where vitlausa is ‘stupid/crazy/wrong’ and beinid ‘the bone’). Surely the agonizing pain I experience when I hit my elbow has much more to do with craziness than amusement. So my question is: why the hell would you call this particular body part funny, when its distinguishing feature is precisely how much it hurts when you hit it? I was even more perplexed when I learned from my dictionary that crazy bone also has the metaphoric meaning of “a sense of humor.” In my quest to unravel the mystery of the word, I stumbled onto some interesting details.

First of all, the funny bone isn’t a bone at all. It’s basically a nerve called the ulnar nerve which runs down the inside part of the elbow and controls feeling in some of the fingers (and by the way the Latin word ulna and Old English el- in elbow are from the same proto-indo-Europoan root *el- ‘elbow, forearm’). And here’s the crucial part: the painful sensation we get when we hit the elbow comes when the ulnar nerve hits the humerus, the long bone that starts at the elbow and goes up to the shoulder. Hence, some sources say that funny bone was originally a pun on the word humerus and its resemblance to humorous. Ha, ha, ha. I love it how earlier generations’ puns and slang is never as good as ours (funny bone is attested from 1840).

I’m guessing that if you are a native speaker, funny bone probably always sounded perfectly straight-forward, even if you didn’t know the background of the word. Maybe you understood funny as ‘peculiar, strange’, and not just ‘amusing’ like I did. But more importantly, we are used to not paying attention to our language simply because it is all messed up, full of irregularities and illogical things. Which is precisely why it is so rich.

The metaphoric meaning “sense of humor” makes some sense now. Besides, it’s much more fun to be able to describe humor in more concrete ways, as if you’re literally tickling somebody’s sense of humor, a specific bodypart. God knows how many comedy clubs and games websites play on it. However, being able to trace the etymology of the word and explain the metaphor doesn’t make it any more noble—to me, the most interesting things are often those that can’t be explained. Which brings me to:

What I found most interesting in this funny bone enterprise was to compare the equivalents of crazy/funny bones in other languages (unfortunately I only found some examples from Romance and Germanic languages). There is definitely a lot of “jovial” stuff going on: Spanish has hueso de la alegrÌa, ‘bone of happiness/joy.’ German has musikantenknochen ‘bone of musician(s).’ But the winner is without a doubt French with its petit juif, literally ‘small Jew’. Now that just cracks me up. The French DO add petit to every word in their vocabulary to make new words, or so it seems, but where did the Jew come from? Perhaps I shouldn’t be laughing. Considering how much social power is invested in language, reflected in metaphors like this, I wouldn’t be surprised to find a superficial stereotype or hidden agenda underlying this French version of the funny bone. What it is remains a mystery to me.