Day 2 – “B” as in “Busking”
Day 2 of the A-to-Z Blogging Challenge, and on to the letter “B.” Which, today, is for “Busking.” This word is not widely-known, and that’s perfectly understandable. I had no clue what busking was until this last year. It is a very archaic term–let’s shed some light on it with an education moment, brought to you by (of course) the letter B….
In the Oxford Dictionary, “busk” is defined as the following:
[to] play music or otherwise perform for voluntary donations in the street or in subways (Oxford Dictionary, 2015).
To simplify that and make it tangible, a busker is basically a street performer, selling their talent on the street for public donations. The Oxford Dictionary goes on to explain a little bit of the “busking” origin:
Busking used to take place not in shopping centres but at sea. The word busk comes from Italian buscare or Spanish buscar, which both mean ‘to seek’. Its earliest use in English was in the nautical sense ‘cruise about, tack’. This became extended to mean ‘go about selling things’, and then, in the middle of the 19th century, ‘go about performing’ (Oxford Dictionary, 2015).
While that’s all fine and dandy, you’re probably wondering what busking has to do with my blog challenge theme of Poetry. And that’s fair. But what many people don’t know about me is that busking has everything to do with Poetry if you’re in my little corner of the world, and that is precisely what I wish to share with you in this post.