Most of the time when an article begins, "I've never seen the show X, but…," you ought to run for the hills. This delightful lexical indexing of the word 'bones' in the TV show Bones, however, might be the exception. For The Verge's Hack Week, writer Sean O'Kane, who claims to have never seen an episode of the 10-season long crime drama, discovered that in the past decade of the show's history, the word "bones" only referred to actual bones 820 times in the 2,668 times it was uttered in the script. (The other 1,848 references were to the show's protagonist, Temperance "Bones" Brennan, who herself says "bones" 346 times).
O'Kane used fan written scripts to crunch his numbers, so he warns they might be a little off. That said, he guesses a supercut of all the times the word "bones" is said on Bones would last an entire 22 minutes.
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