buy the farm

24 June 2020

To buy the farm is military, especially U.S. Air Force, slang meaning to die, especially in an aircraft crash. That particular wording dates at least to the Korean War—it’s very likely older, perhaps dating to World War II, but older written uses haven’t been unearthed—but there are older formulations using the verb to buy that mean the same thing.

The earliest example of buy the farm that I’ve found is from the Memphis, Tennessee Commercial Appeal for 3 November 1952, in an article about jet combat in Korea:

Two of the MIGs had me wired for sound. Cannonballs were flying thick and fast. I thought I’d had it—bought the farm.”

The phrase is also glossed in a New York Times article on U.S. Air Force slang on 7 March 1954:

BOUGHT A PLOT: Had a fatal crash.

Another early example is from two years later, in the Los Angeles Times for 5 December 1955 in another article about air force fliers:

“Sure luck nobody bought the farm!”
Translated this means:
[...]
“Sure lucky nobody was killed.”

And it makes its way into the linguistics journal American Speech in May 1955:

BUY THE FARM; BUY A PLOT, v. phr. Crash fatally. (Jet pilots say that when a jet crashes on a farm the farmer usually sues the government for damages done to his farm by the crash, and the amount demanded is always more than enough to pay off the mortgage or even buy the farm outright. Since this type of crash is nearly always fatal to the pilot, “the pilot pays for the farm with this life.”)

While the definition given here is correct, the explanation is probably wrong, for reasons that will be made clear below. But we can’t dismiss the liability metaphor out of hand. We have examples of similar metaphors at play. One example of buy being used for liability for damages is this 1938 American Speech article on the slang of bus drivers:

BOUGHT A CAR (or TELEPHONE POLE, etc.) A driver is to blame for an accident.

More likely, however, the metaphor at play in the Air Force phrase is not a liability lawsuit, but rather the death benefit that U.S. military service people get if they die in line of duty. The idea is that the payment would be sufficient to buy the parents’ farm. Also, the inclusion of buy a plot in the American Speech entry militates against the liability explanation; plot is commonly used to mean a gravesite.

We have an example of the death benefit usage from World War II. The phrase buy the farm here is not a metaphor, but rather is quite literal. An Associated Press story of 26 April 1944 tells the story of Navy sailor Johnnie Hutchins who posthumously received the Medal of Honor for his actions during the invasion of Lae, New Guinea the previous September:

When young Johnnie was home the last time he had told the folks that if anything happened to him he wanted them to use the death benefit money to buy the farm. And so when the check from the Navy came last winter it went to make the down payment on the farm at Lissie.

This example would indicate that early uses of the phrase were likely to have been in all the services, not just the Air Force. The fact that we have no uses of the metaphor until almost ten years later, and all of those are in an Air Force, doesn’t strain credulity. Slang terms frequently go for decades before seeing print. It seems likely that buy the farm became a slang term during World War II and went unnoticed by those outside military circles until another war a decade later.

And both the liability and death benefit metaphors may be at play. A phrase can certainly represent multiple underlying ideas.

Furthermore, the form buy the farm is not the oldest use of buy in this sense. It has predecessors dating back over a hundred years.

The idea of buying death, or more generally a mishap, goes back to at least 1826—if not considerably earlier, as in the ancient myth of paying the ferryman to cross over to the other side. But it appears in that year in William Glascock’s Naval Sketchbook:

So you may suppose every man was at his gun in a crack; and never mind, in closing with Crappo [i.e., the French], if we didn’t buy it with his raking broadsides.

And buying it appears in the context of air combat in World War I. From Walter Noble’s 1920 With a Bristol Fighter Squadron:

A lucky shot might at any moment send us crashing to earth. How we got away without a scratch is a marvel. The engine was not damaged; but the wings and fuselage, with fifty-three bullet holes, caused us to realize on our return how near had been to “buying it.”

And buy it appears in the context of air combat during World War II. Hunt and Pringle’s 1943 Service Slang: A First Selection records:

He bought it, he was shot down.

And from the inter-war years, but presumably dating to World War I in oral usage, Fraser and Gibbons’s 1925 Soldier and Sailor Words have a more general, less deadly, use of buy in military slang:

To buy, to have something not desired, such as a job, thrust on one unexpectedly, e.g., “Just as he was going out, he ran into the Corporal and bought a fatigue.” [...] Another meaning: to be scored off or victimized. Of a man getting an answer to a question which made him ridiculous: “He bought it that time.”

That same source has buying a packet meaning to be wounded:

Packet, a bullet wound, e.g. it would be said of a wounded man:—He “stopped a packet” or “bought a packet”—i.e., got hit by a bullet. Also, any trouble or unexpected bad luck.

So, buying a farm is a variation on the much older buying it, based on either a metaphor of buying a burial plot or the parent’s farm with one’s military death benefit, perhaps influenced by the notion of the military’s liability for damages on the ground caused by crashed aircraft.

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Sources:

Associated Press. “Parents Get Farm, Medal.” Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 April 1944, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Engler, Leo F. “A Glossary of United States Air Force Slang.” American Speech, 30.2, May 1955, 116.

Glascock, William N. Naval Sketchbook, second edition, vol. 1. London: Henry Colburn, 1826, 30. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Gray, Robert. “47 States Have Sent MiG-Killers to War.” Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), 3 November 1952, 22. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. buy the farm v.

“Jet-Stream of Talk.” New York Times, 7 March 1954, SM20. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Miles, Marvin. “U.S. Fliers Wage Real Cold War.” Los Angeles Times, 5 December 1955, 21. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Morris, Bernard. “The Lingo of Bus Drivers.” American Speech, 13.4, December 1938, 308.

Nobel, Walter. With a Bristol Fighter Squadron. London: A. Melrose, 1920, 70. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989 with draft additions from June 2003, s.v. buy, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2005, s.v. packet, n. and adj.

busman's holiday

Albert Chevalier in costume as a cockney costermonger, c. 1890

22 June 2020

When I was young, my mother, a community college professor who taught children’s literature among other things, took me to the local public library on a regular basis. One day as we were checking out books, she ran into one of the college librarians and said, “Oh, I see you’re taking a busman’s holiday.” They laughed and chatted a bit, then as we turned back to public librarian to check out our books, the librarian said, “Oh, are you bus drivers?” My mother had then to explain that it was just an expression. For some reason, the incident stuck with me.

So, what is a busman’s holiday? Fortunately, the earliest known use of the phrase also contains an explanation. From an article written by music-hall actor Albert Chevalier in the April 1893 issue of the English Illustrated Magazine:

I shall indeed take a holiday soon, probably on the Continent; but it will be a “Busman’s Holiday.” The bus-driver spends his “day off” in driving on a pal’s bus, on the box-seat by his pal’s side; and I know that night after night, all through my holiday, I shall be in and out of this hall and that theatre, never happy except when I am watching some theatrical piece or Variety entertainment.

Being from 1893, the phrase predates motorized buses, originally referring to the horse-drawn variety.

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Sources:

Chevalier, Albert. “On Costers and Music Halls.” The English Illustrated Magazine,” iss. 115, April 1893, 488.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2012, s.v. busman, n.

Photo credit: brother Bertram Chevalier (brother of subject), U.K. National Portrait Gallery.

minstrel

Sheet music cover for songs by the blackface Christy Minstrels, 1847

21 June 2020

Shameful aspects of history that we like to think are long past us sometimes continue to reverberate today. Such is the case with the word minstrel, which in the American context acquired a racist association whose legacy continues to haunt us.

The word minstrel comes to us from the Medieval Latin ministrallus, meaning an official or lieutenant. It comes from the same root that gives us minister and is recorded in Anglo-Latin texts (i.e., Latin texts written in England) written prior to 1227. By 1266 the Latin word had acquired the sense of a servant, and by 1330 it was being used in the specific sense of a servant who entertained with music or song.

Use of minstrel in English follows the same path, but unusually the English words are recorded before the Anglo-Latin ones. The sense of an official or functionary of a lord appears in the text Ancrene Riwle, a guide for anchoresses, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 402, written sometime before 1200, with the manuscript from c.1230

Neomeð nu ȝeme of hwucche twa meosters þes twa menestraws seruið hare lauerd, þe deouel of helle.

(Now take heed of these two offices, these two minstrels serve their lord, the devil in hell.)

The sense of a musician or entertainer can be found as early as 1300 in the poem Iacob and Iosep:

Hem oftok a menestral, his harpe he bar arugge.

(He was taken for a minstrel, his harp he bore on his back.)

This medieval sense of minstrel continues to this day, and this usage remains unproblematic. But in the American context, minstrel has become associated with blackface performers, presenting a positive image of slavery in the antebellum American South.

Minstrel was applied to black, often enslaved, performers from early in the nineteenth century. In an 1812 poem supporting abolition of the slave trade, George Dyer refers to black musicians as a minstrel band:

And, hark! I hear a minstrel band.
The negro-slaves, now slaves no more,
Have struck a chord untouch’d before.
Of Afric’s wrongs, and Afric’s pains,
Oft had they sigh’d in lonely strains.

A note in the text says that this poem had been printed “many years before” in the Morning Chronicle, but I have been unable to find this earlier publication.

And a story by a Miss Leslie from January 1832 refers to a black musician as a sable minstrel. Given the story is set in antebellum Virginia, the man and the boy who accompanies him are almost certainly slaves, but the text does not call this fact out:

The two musicians—a black man who played on the violin, and a mulatto-boy with a tambourine [...] he called to the musicians to cease, much to the vexation of the unfashionable portion of the party, and greatly to the discomfiture of the sable minstrel and his assistant, neither of whom, however, could refrain, as the sleigh wafted them along, from giving an occasional scrape on the fiddle, or a thump on the tambourine.

In both of these instances, the word minstrel itself carries no racial implications; it simply means musician. And the 1832 instance has to use the modifier sable to emphasize the musician’s race. But these instances show the chain of semantic association beginning to form. And by 1840, minstrel was being used to refer to white musicians and singers who performed in blackface. Here is a notice of performance by William M. “Billy” Whitlock, a blackface performer in the Atlas from 22 November 1840:

Long island and Old Wirginny Melodies, accompanied on the Banjo, by the inimitable Ethiopian Minstrel, Whitlock.

And there is this 19 December 1842 notice in the New York Herald that mentions Daniel Emmett, the blackface performer who is traditionally claimed to be the composer of Dixie:

Besides the classic performances in the arena this evening, the renowned Ethiopian Minstrel of the South, Mr. Emmit [sic] and his pupil, Master Pierce, will add to the merriment of the occasion.

Blackface minstrelsy would continue to be acceptable to American whites through to the late twentieth century, but it is rightly dead as a continuing tradition of performance.

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Sources:

The Atlas (New York), 22 November 1840, 3. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Dyer, George. “Ode 9: On Considering the Unsettled State of Europe, and the Opposition Which Had Been Made to Attempts for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.” Poetics. London: J. Johnson and Co., 1812, 132. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. ministrallus.

Miss Leslie. “Frank Finlay.” Lady’s Book, January 1832, 53. ProQuest.

Middle English Dictionary, 2018, s.v. minstral n.

Napier, Arthur, ed. Iacob and Iosep. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916, 360.

New York Herald, 19 December 1842, 2. ProQuest Civil War Era.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2002, s.v. minstrel, n.

Image credit: Boston Public Library, 2007.

bunk / bunkum

20 June 2020

Bunk or bunkum is nonsense, gobbledygook, double-talk. This word is a case where we’re confident in how it was coined, but the precise details are illusory, probably lost to history. Bunk and bunkum are variants of the name of Buncombe County, North Carolina, and that county became associated with bloviation through its representative to the sixteenth Congress, Felix Walker.

The phrase talking to Bunkum is first recorded in the pages of the Niles Weekly Register in September 1828, and it contains the nub of the story of the term’s origin:

“TALKING TO BUNKUM!” This is an old and common saying at Washington, when a member of congress is making one of those hum-drum and unlistened to “long talks: which have lately become so fashionable—not with the hope of being heard in the house, but to afford an enlightened representative a pretence for sending a copy of his speech to his constituents, the making of many which have been paid for, as a tailor would be for making a coat, or the hatter a hat. We say his speech, for it is just as much so as his hat, and purchased with his money, if not gratuitously manufactured by the hand of a friend. This is cantly called “talking to Bunkum:” an “honorable gentleman” long ago, having said that he was not speaking to the house, but to the people of a certain county in his district, which, in local phrase, he called “Bumkum”. But these are not the only description of persons who “talk to Bunkum”—for the most intelligent and amusing, as well as the most ignorant and foolish members of legislative bodies do it—but the object of both [is] to misrepresent facts.

While this account does a fine job of defining the phrase and gives a general outline of the origin, but it is short on details as to the origin, namely when the speech in Congress occurred and who gave it.

We do have this, however, from the official History of Congress for 25 February 1820 in which Felix Walker gave or attempted to give a speech on the Missouri Question, that is whether the territory of Missouri should be admitted to the union, and if so, whether as a slave state or a free state:

Mr. WALKER, of North Carolina, rose then to address the Committee on the question; but the question was called for so clamorously and so perseveringly that Mr. W. could proceed no farther than to move the Committee rise.

The Committee refused to rise, by almost a unanimous vote.

[Rising is an arcane parliamentary procedure of the House of Representatives. The House can, if it wishes, dissolve into a committee of the whole where rules are relaxed. To rise is to adjourn the committee and return to regular order.]

There is, however, no record of what was actually said. The City of Washington Gazette on 11 May 1820 printed a copy of a speech by Walker on the Missouri Question, but doesn’t specifically indicate when the speech was given, and the text of the speech itself makes no mention of Buncombe or talking to Buncombe. Nor is there a record of the House taking up the Missouri Question in early May. It may be that Walker attempted to give this speech on or about 11 May 1820 and was shouted down because he was out of order, discussing a controversial topic that wasn’t on the agenda. Or it could be that several months after the fact this paper printed the speech that Walker had intended to give in February.

The word bunkum makes its way into American discourse within ten years, and the spelling changed as the original association with Buncombe County was lost. Here is one from The Boston Commercial Gazette of 16 February 1829:

Every one is ignorant of the plans and intentions of the President elect on this subject. The “exclusives,” as the bunkum Jackson democrats are styled by their more moderate partizans, will be sorely disappointed in regard to the distribution of offices under the administration of the old General.

It appears in the Providence Patriot (Rhode Island) on 26 May 1830 in a context far from that of politics:

“My hair is grey—but not with years.”—So says Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon—and so, on Sunday morning last, might have said the whispering woods and the sighing verdure of the fields, having been covered with a beautiful but cold drapery of frost, which was anything but “bunkum.” Vegetation it is tho’t, of some kinds, will be materially injured in the vicinity.

And a few days later it is used without quotation marks or italics in a letter to the editor by one Tom Strickland (more likely it is a letter from the editor) composed in what passes for a rustic dialect. Such dialect was a feature of newspapers of the period (see okay https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/ok-okay). Strickland is writing about a visit by two women collecting money for a battle monument on Bunker Hill:

Now do my dear jist give me five Dollars it will look so queer to se evry bodys name but mine on that long papur I shall feel ashamd cant help it says I I am stif as a moniment yes says one of the wimmin with the long papur and youre hart is as hard as Quincey grannit dont care for that says I I never new but two good things come from Quincy yet, and them the too John Adamses and they wor what I call Bunkum so of they trudged but I heard them tell my wife at the door they would call agin.

Bunkum appears in Britain by 1837, but at first in articles quoting American newspapers. From the Chester Chronicle of 3 March 1837 quoting from the New York Sunday Morning Post, but using the word in an unusual sense:

Young Durivage, the comic actor, writes and speaks as good Yankee as any man on the stage. He headed his benefit bill at Bangor with the following cute phrase:—“Our folks want to know, if your folks’ll come down to-night to see our folks, and fetch all your folks along? All the fellers must put on their yellerest vests and stiffest shirt collars, and fetch all the galls, and I’ll bet a hunk of gingerbread agin a gov of ‘lasses candy that you’ll have a bunkum time!”

And this from the London Morning Post, quoting the Pennsylvania Enquirer, on 26 February 1842:

Mr. Deford (chairman of the committee on banks) accused the gentleman from the county (Mr. M’Cahen) of speaking more for “Bunkum” than a desire to promote the public good.

The next year the Morning Post on 19 July 1843 uses the word in its own copy, but in reference to the United States. The article is penned by one Sam Slick, and there are numerous articles by him that use the word in succeeding issues of the paper:

I’ll tell you what Bunkum is. All over America, every place likes to hear of its Members of Congress, and see their speeches, and if they don’t, they send a piece to the paper, enquirin’ if their Member died a nateral death, or was skewered with a bowie knife, for they hante seen his speeches lately, and his friends are anxious to know his fate. [...] In short, almost all that’s said in Congress in the colonies, for we set the fashions to them, as Paris gals do to our milliners.) and all over America is Bunkum.

But a few months later on 11 November 1843, the Bucks Herald of Aylesbury uses it to refer to libel act that is before parliament:

In fact, the act was, and ever will be, Bunkum.

And by 1845 the word had reached Australia, as evidenced by this account of boxing match that appeared in Bell’s Life in Sydney on 20 September 1845:

The stakes were not given up for one hour, it being arranged that should Arthur come to in that time, the battle should be renewed; he did come to, but, notwithstanding all the bunkum of his most sanguine backer, he could not be persuaded to again stand to the severe butting of Billy’s “nulla nulla like cobara.

Bunkum was shortened to just bunk by the end of the century. Humorist F.P. Dunne put the word into the mouth of his character Mr. Dooley, an Irish immigrant to the United States in 1893:

That is th’ real Irish village [...] I think th’ other one from Donegal is a sort of bunk, I do, an’ I niver liked Donegal.

And humorist George Ade used it in his slang-ridden 1900 “The Fable of the Grass Widow”:

One Day a keen Business manager who thought nobody could Show him was sitting at his Desk. A Grass Widow floated in, and stood Smiling at him. She was a Blonde, and had a Gown that fit her as if she had been Packed into it by Hydraulic Pressure. She was just as Demure as Edna May ever tried to be, but the Business Manager was a Lightning Calculator, and he Surmised that the Bunk was about to be Handed to him.

So that’s the tale of bunk, a.k.a. bunkum, a rare case where we’re pretty sure of the exact coinage of a word that first appears in speech.

To add a final bit of strangeness, bunk and bunkum are etymologically unrelated to bunco, meaning a swindler or a swindle. (I remember watching old episodes of the Dragnet TV series where Sgt. Friday was working out of the Los Angeles Police Department’s bunco squad.) Bunco is from the Spanish banco, a variation on three-card monte. It’s established in English by the 1870s. But while bunco and bunk are unrelated, they undoubtedly influenced and reinforced each other over the years.

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Sources:

Ade, George. “The Fable of the Grass Widow and the Mesmeree and the Six Dollars.” More Fables, Chicago: Herbert S. Stone and Company, 1900, 22.

“The Clear Grit.” Chester Chronicle, 3 March 1837, 4.

“Defamation and Libel Bill.” Bucks Herald (Aylesbury, England), 11 November 1843, 3.

“Extract of a Letter from Washington.” Boston Commercial Gazette, 16 February 1829, 4. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Fight Between Black Billey, alias Young Sambo, & Mad Arthur.” Bell’s Life in Sydney and Sporting Reviewer, 20 September 1845, 3. National Library of Australia: Trove.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. bunkum n., bunk, n.2.

“The Missouri Bill.” History of Congress, House of Representatives, 25 February 1820, 1539. Library of Congress: A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation.

“Missouri Question: Speech of Mr. Walker of N.C.” City of Washington Gazette, 11 May 1820, 2–3.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. buncombe | bunkum, n., bunk, n.4., bunco, n.

Providence Patriot, 26 May 1830, 2. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

Safire, William. Safire’s Political Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 2008, s.v. bunk.

“SECOND EDITION: The United States.” Morning Post (London), 26 February 1842, 5.

Slick, Sam. “BUNKUM.—“Bunkum!” Morning Post (London), 19 July 1843, 3

Strickland, Tom. “Distressing Situation” (letter to editor). Boston Courier, 31 May 1830, 1. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

“Talking to Bunkum.” Niles Weekly Register, 27 September 1828, 66. HathiTrust Digital Library.

bump / bumper crop

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.

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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.