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

[Wilson Gray]

Could be, I guess. There's nothing that says that there can be only
one origin of a slang term. FWIW, my experience is that "rap" in the
sense of "hit, strike" is only a literary term among black speakers.
I've never used it with that meaning, myself, and I've never heard it
so used by any other black person. Indeed, I've heard it spoken only
once by anyone at all, in real life. When I was in the Army, I once
heard a white GI say, "Stop it, or I'll rap you in the mouth!"

And, as you yourself say, American prisoners "tapped." They didn't "rap."

As Richard Pryor once noted: "God ain't never dug no whole lot of
people. Jesus and Moses the only ones He ever rapped to."

-Wilson

On 10/22/06, Cohen, Gerald Leonard <gcohen at umr.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Cohen, Gerald Leonard" <gcohen at UMR.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Take the rag off the bush---(origin of "rap" (talk)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>      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.
> =20
>     I also remember reading an article about US prisoners in Hanoi =
> during the Vietnam War who communicated via tapping on the walls.=20
> =20
> 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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--
Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our
race. He brought death into the world.

--Sam Clemens

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