How to avoid ... boners?

Looking through some archived Daily Evergreens from 1933 I came across this interesting ad. My first reaction was to laugh out loud. Then I had to show everyone in the newsroom.

After we all had a good laugh I began to suspect that the colloquial term "boner" must have experienced some kind of metamorphosis between the years of 1933 and 2010. I decided to keep looking through the dusty pages, searching for more boner references.

The meaning of boner did not remain elusive for long. By the second ad I came to I could pretty much assume that boner meant to make a mistake or blunder in speech. So I looked up the history of the word "boner."

Sure enough, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the phrase was originally a baseball term meaning "'blunder,' 1912, baseball slang, probably from bonehead."

So the mystery of the word "boner" was solved. Which is good to because I couldn't understand why ANYONE would want to buy a brand of pipe tobacco that makes your penis soft ...