24 April 2023
WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) — There’s a debate going on right now on TikTok:
In the old nursery rhyme, is Bingo the name of the dog or the farmer? It seems pretty straightforward that it’s the name of the dog.
There are probably thousands of dogs named Bingo. Countless videos for children can be found online, showing a cartoon version of a dog while voices sing the classic nursery rhyme.
Is that truly the case though? The rules of grammar may tell us another story altogether.
There are many versions of the nursery rhyme out there, but the ones were are probably most familiar with start out very much the same:
“There was a farmer, had a dog, and Bingo was his name-o.” However, there’s a pretty serious grammatical error there.
It’s corrected in other versions of the song:
“There was a farmer who had a dog and Bingo was his name-o.”
In the first version, the dog is definitely named Bingo because of the pronoun “his.” In this case, Bingo is the antecedent of the pronoun His, or in other words, the proper name of the noun that the pronoun is referring back to.
However, the sentence is grammatically incorrect because it requires the pronoun “who” to identify ownership of the dog, with had being the past participle. There are multiple versions of the song to be found online that include the correct pronoun of who in their lyrics.
However, by including who, you get a paradox of who exactly is who. Actually, though, none of those grammar rules actually matter because the dog is, without question, named Bingo.
That’s because Bingo was never originally a nursery rhyme. It’s actually an old Scottish drinking song.
In this version of the song, It’s made clear right away that Bingo belongs to the farmer because the first two lines say, “The farmer’s dog leapt over the stile, his name was little Bingo.”
If there’s any confusion about the last word in the first sentence, “ftyle” is the old Scottish spelling of “stile,” with stile being a series of steps or rungs someone can use to climb over a fence or wall that still prevents livestock from escaping.
As for what kind of dog Bingo was, we don’t know for sure. However, since we know the song’s origin is Scotland, that narrows it down to just 14 breeds.