Somebody told me that Rock-a-bye baby is a nursery rhyme. But how do I use the phrase actually and what does it mean? This is the lyrics from the nursery rhyme:
Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall
And down will come baby, cradle and all
As a non-native English speaker, it's hard for me to interpret the meaning. This phrase also can be heard in the Eminem song When I'm gone.
That's Slim Shady, yeah baby Slim Shady's crazy
Shady made me
But tonight, Shady's rock-a-bye baby.
Dictionary.com says it's an interjection that means "used to settle baby to sleep". Then what does it mean? And how to use it?
Best Answer
Rock-a-bye has no particular meaning, though it's obviously patterned on lullaby, with rock replacing lull. Light songs and verses often incorporate nonce-expressions (expressions made up for the immediate occasion) and nonsense words and intruded syllables. They're intended not to communicate a 'meaning' but to create a rhythm or a mood or to establish a sonic pattern.
They're particularly common in songs and verses for very young children:
Once they've been created, however, these nonsense patterns take on a life of their own (the word lullaby itself probably started as a series of meaningless but soothing syllables), and it's not at all unusual for them to be employed as allusions to the work or genre from which they're drawn. Cole Porter, for instance, in his reworking of Shakespeare's Shrew as Kiss Me Kate, echoes hey, nonny, nonny very wittily:
In 1918 Al Jolson had a #1 hit with the song Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody, where rock-a-bye has taken on the sense "sing a lullaby to". And Eminem is doing something similar in When I'm gone. The song is about the conflict between the demands of his career and the needs of his daughter and estranged wife. The couplet you cite expresses this in the contrast between the two rhyming terms: "Slim Shady" is the aggressive persona he adopts when he sings to his audience, the persona which "made" him a star, "Rock-a-bye-baby" is the persona he strains to adopt at home, singing to his daughter.