Cry Baby Bunting

Posted on by

Over the weekend I was thinking a great deal about the old nursery rhyme “Cry Baby Bunting”, and if you think that’s a funny thing for me to ponder over, you must bear in mind that I was making twenty-five metres of pink and white bunting at the time! Believe me, there was little else to consider.

I wondered about the word “bunting” itself – what an odd word for flags. I kept thinking of Billy Bunter (the fat schoolboy from the Billy Bunter books penned by Charles Hamilton – pen name, Frank Richards). Then I wondered about the fat Prince Regent who built the Brighton Pavilions – I thought he was a William and might later have been the inspiration for the Billy Bunter character – but actually, it doesn’t figure because I was mistaken and his name was George IV! (Almost right!) But now I’ve checked it all to my satisfaction and copied and pasted some interesting snippets below (who’d have guessed that ‘bunter’ was a term of endearment?). Of course, it may be of more interest to you if, like me, you’ve spent much of the weekend cutting and sewing material into strings of pretty flags.

Personally, I don’t care if I ever see bunting again! And don’t mention making them – too much like penance!

 

 

Lyrics[edit]

The most common modern version is:

Bye, baby Bunting,
Daddy’s gone a-hunting,
Gone to get a rabbit skin
To wrap the baby Bunting in.[1]

Origins[edit]

The term bunting is a term of endearment that may also imply ‘plump’.[1] The earliest published version was published in Gammer Gurton’s Garland or The Nursery Parnassus in England in 1784.[1] A version in Songs for the Nursery 1805 had the longer lyrics:

Bye, baby Bunting,
Father’s gone a-hunting,
Mother’s gone a-milking,
Sister’s gone a-silking,
Brother’s gone to buy a skin
To wrap the baby Bunting in.[1]
The Grammarphobia Blog

Bye, baby bunting

APRIL 13TH, 2010

Q: I’m curious about the term “baby bunting” in this nursery rhyme: “Bye, baby bunting,  / Father’s gone a-hunting,  / Mother’s gone a-milking, / Sister’s gone a-silking, / Brother’s gone to buy a skin  / To wrap the baby bunting in.” Any idea of the origin?

A: “Bunting” has been a term of endearment since at least as far back as the 1660s. The origins of the word are unknown but it’s had a long association with plumpness, with bottoms, and with “butt” (both the noun and the verb).

In Scottish, according to the OED, the term buntin means short and thick, or plump. A similar term in Welsh, bontin, means the rump.

And in Scottish as well as in dialectal English, both “bunt” and “bun” have been used to refer to the tail of a rabbit or hare.

The verb “bunt” was used in the 1800s to mean the same as “butt” – to strike, knock, or push. (Yes, this is where the baseball term “bunt” comes from, circa 1889.)

And in a 19th-century Sussex dialect, to “bunt” was to rock a cradle with one’s foot (by pushing or “butting” it).

The adjective “bunting” has been used to mean plump, swelling, or filled out since the 1500s.

John Jamieson, in An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808-25), defined buntin as “short and thick; as a buntin brat, a plump child.”

In the phrase “baby bunting,” the Oxford English Dictionarysays, “the meaning (if there be any at all) may possibly be” as in Jamieson’s definition.

At bottom, if you’ll pardon the expression, the phrase in the nursery rhyme seems to be an affectionate reference to an infant’s plumpness or to its rosy rump.

The earliest version of the nursery rhyme dates from the 1780s, and the longer version you quote has been traced to 1805.

Surprisingly, the OED has no reference to the garment known as a “bunting” – an infant’s cuddly, cocoon-like, hooded outerwear. This sense of the word dates from 1922, according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

The name of the garment, according to our old Merriam-Webster’s New International Dictionary  (the unabridged second edition), is a reference to the “baby bunting” in the nursery rhyme.

In case you’re wondering, the noun “bunting” has been used for another kind of cloth – the open-weave kind used to make flags – as well as for a family of birds (possibly because of their plumpness.)

1 thought on “Cry Baby Bunting”

Comments are closed.