What it means
Your head, said in a daft and affectionate way that takes any seriousness out of it. You bang your bonce on a low beam, you scratch your bonce when a problem stumps you, you pull a hat down over your bonce when it is parky out. It carries a cheeky, music-hall sort of charm, the word a parent reaches for when telling a kid to use the thing on top of their shoulders for once.
Usage examples
"Mind your bonce on that shelf, the last person who forgot ended up with a proper egg on their head."
"Mind your bonce on that low shelf in the cellar of the King's Arms in Bermondsey, the last regular who forgot ended up with a proper egg on his head for the rest of the Tuesday night quiz, the landlord still tells the story to every new customer who takes the corner seat by the dartboard."
"My uncle in Leeds scratched his bonce for a solid five minutes at the Sunday crossword in the kitchen of the terraced house on the corner of the cobbled street, finally cracked four down with a triumphant shout that woke the spaniel under the table, and went off to make a fresh pot of tea to celebrate the breakthrough."
Where it comes from
From the nineteenth-century British slang word bounce for a large marble, the kind used as the king-piece in playground games of the Victorian era, transferred by association to the human head as a similarly round, prominent target. The shortened form bonce appears in English slang dictionaries from the eighteen seventies onwards as music-hall and pub vocabulary, picked up by P. G. Wodehouse in the Jeeves stories and by the Daily Mirror cartoonists of the nineteen fifties, and survives intact today as the cheekily affectionate alternative to head, particularly in northern England and the East End of London among generations of cab drivers and pub regulars.
Other ways to say it
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