busk ˈbəsk verb
: play music in a public place and solicit money for it
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The word busk has appeared in 17 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on April 16 in “Paris’s Cathedral of Imagination and Memory.” In an essay called “A busker’s ode to Notre-Dame,” David McAninch writes:
I’m embarrassed by the thought of it now, nearly 30 years later: me busking in the shadow of Notre-Dame, guitar case open for donations as I belted out Bob Dylan and Neil Young songs. I was awful, yet another contributor to a particular strain of noise pollution that has degraded the quality of life in European city centers at least since Bob Marley’s “Exodus” came out. But back then you could make a lot of money in Paris if you sang with a bona fide American accent. So, that’s what I did night after night, planting myself at the edge of the cathedral’s tourist-choked parvis and parlaying an eight-song repertoire from the Liberal Arts College Songbook into a not-insignificant revenue stream.
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