Jennifer Bateman, age 11, of Peterborough, Ontario, for her question:

Why is the funny bone funny?

Only a very funny type person could have a funny funny bone. To the rest of us, it is a very sensitive elbow joint that hurts like mad if we happen to bash it, eves lightly. True, this tends to send a person into a frenzy of wild, though not serious, agony. In this situation, anybody else's funny bone becomes funny to one and all. But this is not how it got its funny name.

Anatomy students refer to the bone of the upper arm as the humerus. Later in life they are expected to wear the solemn faces usually seen on doctors. But as students some of them tend to show a rather grim type of humor. Most likely, we can blame one of them for naming the funny bone    which is at the elbow end of the humerus bone. Certainly we can blame the humerus humorous joke on somebody who flunked high school spelling. This, of course, is not saying that he also failed to become a top notch doctor of medicine later in life.