Antedating of _Rag_ 'A Type of Musical Composition"

[Fred Shapiro]

On Thu, 29 Mar 2007, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:

> 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".

Abbott and Seroff write that "This is the earliest-known printed reference
to the word 'rags' to indicate a particular type of music. 'The Bully'
[this song is referred to in the 1894 passage quoted above] ... has been
popular acknowledged as a seminal ragtime song."

Fred Shapiro


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE BOOK OF QUOTATIONS
   Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press
Yale Law School                             ISBN 0300107986
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org