Burning Bant

[benoni45]

Burning bant is a type of smooth white string we used in the 50's to string our home-made bows and gardeners used to tie up their plants on allotments!
Nobody else seems to have heard of it. Any of you people familiar with it?

[Quizmonster]

Well, bant is a dialect word meaning strength or springiness, so that would fit well with the idea of using such a string in bows. I'm not sure about the burning bit. Bant also had to do with a 19th century dieting fad, but that seems to have nothing to do with the ideas here.

[fredpuli47]

Did it burn? My first guess was that burning was a variant or mishearing of burnet meaning 'dark brown', but your string was white, so that's out LOL It may be that 'burning' is a rendering of some trade or manufacturer's name such as 'Bunning'.

[celeryman]

Quite a few years ago my late grandmother used the expression MONEY FOR BURNING BANT. This was in response to having heard that someone had paid over the odds for something. As a kid she had lit the end of string and then twirled it around in the dark,this produced patterns due to what we would now call retinal retention. This twirling of string or bant must have been something to do on dark nights before facebook.
Obviously noone would pay for bits of bant so money for burning bant meant you had paid over odds.............