Take the rag off the bush---(origin of "rap" (talk)

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

     FWIW, I've always assumed that "rap" (talk) derives from the rapping by prisoners on the pipes or walls of their prison in order to communicate. I wrote up a brief item on this about 25 years ago in my Comments on Etymology.  One of my departmental secretaries was married to a man who had served time in a Missouri prison, and he said that the prisoners (sometimes?) were ordered to be silent, and in those cases the rapping on the walls or the pipes (I forget which) was the only means of communicating.  Cf. also the movie Birdman of Alcatraz, where the prisoner learns of the commuation of his death sentence via the other prisoners who had been informed by their outside contacts and who passed along the information by rapping on the pipes.
 
    I also remember reading an article about US prisoners in Hanoi during the Vietnam War who communicated via tapping on the walls. 
 
Gerald Cohen

________________________________

From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Wilson Gray
Sent: Sun 10/22/2006 4:33 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Take the rag off the bush



My intuition has always been that "rap" having to do with some kind of
speech act was derived from the still-used "hit (on)," which, of
course, as a slang term, has nothing to do with the physical act and
everything to do with speech. But, other than that feeling, I got
nothing, to coin a phrase.

<snip>

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