Antedating of _Rag_ 'A Type of Musical Composition"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 3/29/07, Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> rag (OED, n.5 2., 1897)
>
> 1894 _Leavenworth Herald_ 8 Dec. in Lynn Abbott & Doug Seroff _Out of
> Sight_ (2002) 448  Kansas City girls can't play anything on pianos except
> "rags," and the wordst king of "rags" at that.

Interesting. I'm not entirely convinced that this is exactly OED n5
sense 2, since we don't know whether the writer would call an
individual composition a "rag" (let alone whether these tunes have
"ragtime" syncopation). But even if "rags" is being used here as a
collective plural (roughly equivalent to "junk"), it could still point
to a transitional usage on the way to the ragtime sense of "rag".

--Ben Zimmer

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