Saturday, November 12, 2005

What's a Bonkbuster?

According to the Telegraph (among others), it's "a type of popular novel characterised by frequent explicit sexual encounters between the characters." In other words, a blockbuster, with lots of bonking.

It's remarkable, given the frequency with which bonkbusters are produced on US television, written for US audiences, and put on the big screen, that I'd never heard that word before. Too much time reading manga, I guess (though bonkbuster is certainly a serious subgenre there, too).

2 comments:

ukexpat said...

IIRC the word bonk was coined by spelling knob backwards, so that when you said "bonk" everyone really knew you meant "knob". In any event "who are you bonking these days" sounds a lot more refined than the alternative...

Ahistoricality said...

I can't find any reference to that as an origin. Most of the citations I can find are like this, citing it as an onomatopaeia rather than a rhyming slang or reversal code (as you suggest).

There are two other major meanings: for athletes and diabetics, it means to exhaust the body's fuel supply, "hit the wall"; in certain multi-user game environments (MUDs), it means to "express pique" roughly equivalent to delivering a noogie to the head....