“Bone for tuna” is a humorous, anglicized mispronunciation of the Italian phrase “buona fortuna,” which means “good luck.” The phrase became widely known through the HBO series *Boardwalk Empire*, where it appeared as a pivotal plot point in a Season 3 episode literally titled “Bone for Tuna.”
The Italian Phrase Behind It
“Buona fortuna” (pronounced roughly bwoh-nah for-TOO-nah) is a straightforward Italian expression wishing someone good luck. When spoken quickly by a non-Italian speaker, or heard by someone unfamiliar with the language, the sounds blur together into something that resembles “bone for tuna.” It’s the same kind of linguistic drift that turns “capisce” into “capeesh” or “mozzarella” into “mootz-a-rell” in Italian-American vernacular.
How *Boardwalk Empire* Made It Famous
The phrase got its biggest spotlight in the third season of *Boardwalk Empire*, set during Prohibition-era Atlantic City. In the episode, the crime boss Nucky Thompson leaves a note for his associate Owen Sleater to read aloud to a visiting gangster named Gyp Rossetti. The note is meant as a polite send-off wishing Rossetti good luck, but Sleater butchers the Italian, reading it out as something closer to “bone for tuna.”
The mispronunciation isn’t just played for laughs. Rossetti, who is Italian, takes it as a condescending slight, one more insult stacked on top of a series of broken promises from Nucky. What could have been a simple goodbye becomes a trigger for escalating tension between the characters. The show’s writers used the mangled phrase to illustrate how small miscommunications can carry enormous weight when trust is already thin. As one reviewer put it, when something as simple as a mispronounced “buona fortuna” can mean so much to so many characters, the show’s creators have done their job building an intense backdrop.
Use as Slang
After the episode aired in 2012, “bone for tuna” took on a life of its own as internet slang. People use it as a joking way to wish someone good luck, intentionally leaning into the garbled pronunciation. You’ll see it in text messages, social media posts, and casual conversation, almost always with a wink. The humor comes from the absurdity of the literal image (a bone… for a tuna?) combined with the knowledge that it’s a cheerful butchering of Italian.
It fits into a long tradition of English speakers playfully mangling foreign phrases. Think of “bone appetit” for “bon appétit” or “grassy ass” for “gracias.” These deliberate mispronunciations signal familiarity and humor rather than ignorance, at least when used among friends.
The Phrase in Art
Some searchers may also encounter “bone” and “tuna” as motifs in the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Brooklyn-born artist who rose to fame in the early 1980s. Basquiat’s paintings are dense with fragmented words, anatomical references, and layered text that evoke the look of defaced subway walls or bathroom stalls. His work frequently includes skeletal imagery and scattered, half-decodable phrases. While Basquiat used words and symbols in ways that resist simple interpretation, his paintings are built on the same kind of raw, gut-punch energy that makes a phrase like “bone for tuna” stick in your memory: familiar elements rearranged into something unexpected.
If you came across the phrase outside of *Boardwalk Empire*, though, the meaning is almost certainly the same. It’s “buona fortuna” run through a non-Italian mouth. Good luck, more or less, with a side of humor.