18 June 2020
A good harvest is known as a bumper crop. But why? What does a bumper have to do with agriculture? Tracing the term’s origin follows a rather long path through the last five hundred years, from pustules on the body to drinking songs, but it’s one of fairly typical semantic development.
The root is bump, which appears in the first half of the sixteenth century and is probably echoic in origin, imitating the sound of a collision. It is, in this way, akin to lump (a. 1300) and thump (1552). It first appears in the sense of a protuberance or lump in Thomas Paynell’s 1533 translation of De Morbo Gallico, where it translates the Latin sinus, meaning curve or fold:
For Guaiacum doth resolue and destroy meruaylously swellynges ge∣therynges to gether of yll matters, hard∣nesses bumpis, and knobbes.
It also appears in John Florio’s 1598 A Worlde of Words, an early Italian-English dictionary, in the definition for the Italian quosi:
Quosi, red pimples, bumbs or pearles in ones face.
And Shakespeare used the noun bump in Romeo and Juliet, written during the 1590s. Here is the Nurse, in Act 1, Scene 3, recalling how as a toddler Juliet fell and hit her head, from the 1623 First Folio version:
And yet, I warrant, it had vpon it brow a bumpe as big as a young Cockrel’s stone? A perilous knock, and it cryed bitterly. Yea quoth my husband, fall’st vpon thy face, thou wilt fall backward when thou commest to age: wilt thou not, Iule? It stinted: and said I.
This passage is preceded by a discussion of how Juliet, at thirteen, is now of marriageable age, so the falling backward is foreshadowing her falling into bed, on her back, with Romeo.
The verb to bump, meaning to collide or strike, appears in the record after the noun, but this is probably due to the paucity of surviving texts from the era. Logically, the verb should come first, and it probably did, but the earliest surviving use I’m aware of is from Thomas Phaer’s 1558 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. In this passage, from Book 5, he describes the boxing match between Entellus and Dares:
With thondringes thompyng thick, and wery Dares wretche on soyle
With both his armes he bumpes, and upside down doth toss and toyle.
Than lord Eneas wold no longer wrath in them fret,
Nor more Entellus bitter mood on rage he wold haue set.
But end of fighting made, and tyered Dares up did take,
And soft with gentill speche in comfort thus to him he spake.
In the mid sixteenth century we also see the adjective bumping with the sense of growing in size. The existence of the adjective implies the existence of a verb to bump with the sense of to grow in size. From Thomas Nuce’s 1566 translation of Seneca’s Octavia, in a passage describing the sun:
Than which in all the worlde, nothing besyde,
Of all this huge and endlesse worke, the guyde,
More wondrous, nature, framde that I espyde.
For all the bumping bygnesse it doth beare,
Yet waxing olde is like againe to weare,
And to be chaungde to an vnwyldie lumpe.
And, indeed, we see the verb meaning to grow in size in print about a decade later. From a passage about the maple tree in John Gerade’s 1577 The Herball:
The flowers hang by clusters, of a whitish greene colour; after them commeth up long fruite fastened togither by couples, one right against another, with kernels bumping out neere to the place in which they are combined.
By the 1670s we start to see bumper being used to mean a cup that is filled to overflowing. This use first appears, unsurprisingly, in drinking songs. From the 1670 ditty “Mark Noble’s Frollick”:
Sweet Bacchus in Bumpers were flowing,
which Liquor all mortal Men chears,
And now after all I am going,
where you dare not come for your Ears.
Also from 1670 is “The Saint Turn’d Sinner,” a song making fun of dissenters, that is non-Anglican Christians, such as Quakers:
A Gospel Cushion thumper,
Who dearly lov'd a Bumper,
And something else beside Sir,
If he is not bely'd Sir,
This was a holy Guide Sir,
For the Dissenting Train.
And yet another. This one is the chorus to the 1676 song “Gallantry All-A-Mode”:
Cho. Let Bumpers go round,
Let Bumpers go round,
Whilst thus double armed we stand to our ground,
And the dull Rogue that dare,
Bawk his Liquor and spare;
Kick him out,
Kick him out,
Whilst Bumpers go round.
So, it’s no surprise that bumper would acquire the sense of abundance or greatness in size. By the mid eighteenth century we get this note of bumper being used in colloquial speech in exactly this sense. From the Gentleman’s Magazine of June 1759:
I would observe next, that in some of the midland counties, any thing large is called a bumper, as a large apple or pear; hence bumping lass is a large girl of her age, and a bumpkin is a large limbed uncivilized rustic.
And finally, by 1836 we get the phrase bumper crop itself appearing. From an item in the Kelso Mail from 15 August 1836 reprinted in the Scotsman two days later:
Grouse-shooting commenced on Friday, and from all we have been able to learn from the moors in our own vicinity, the birds have seldom keen [sic] known to be so strong and numerous; they are, in fact, a bumper crop, and the sport has, in consequence, been excellent.
So, there you have it. A gradual, step-by-step process of semantic change.
Sources:
Florio, John. A Worlde of Words, or Most Copious, and Exact Dictionarie in Italian and English. London: Arnold Hatfield, 1598, 307. Early English Books Online.
“Gallantry All-A-Mode.” London: F. Coles, c. 1676. Early English Books Online.
Gemsage, Paul. The Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 29, June 1759, 270–72.
Gerarde, John. The Herball. London: John Norton, 1577, 1299.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. bumper n.2.
“Mark Noble’s Frollick.” London: B. Deacon, 1670. Early English Books Online.
Nuce, Thomas. The Ninth Tragedie of Lucius Anneus Seneca called Octauia. London: Henry Denham, 1566, sig. D.ii.verso. Early English Books Online.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2018, s.v. bumper, n.1 and adj., bumping, adj., bump, n.2, bumb, n.
Paynell, Thomas, translation of Ulrich von Hutten’s De Morbo Gallico. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1533, fol. 62v. Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership.
Phaer, Thomas. The Seven First Bookes of the Eneidos of Virgill. London: John Kingston, 1558, v. sig. P.iii. Early English Books Online.
“The Saint Turn'd Sinner; or, The Dissenting Parson's Text Under the Quaker's Petticoats.” London: N. Palmer, 1670. Early English Books Online.
The Scotsman, 17 August 1836, 3.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet. First Folio Text, 1623. Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 22273 Fo.1 no.68, 56.