Something excellent can be said to “tear the rag off the bush,” or “take the rag,” and it likely comes from old Western shooting competitions, where the winner would shoot a rag off a bush. The Oxford English Dictionary shows examples in print going back to the early 19th century. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Tearing the Rag off the Bush”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, Martha, this is David in San Antonio, Texas.
David, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much.
How are you?
Happy here.
Gosh, back in the mid-70s, actually, I worked at a restaurant. Well, we didn’t have computers yet, but we had a cashier. And whenever she was faced with consternation, she would say, “Well, that just tears the rag off the bush.” And I just loved that phrase and have continued to use it throughout my life, but never heard it again from anyone else. But it certainly seemed to, I don’t know, somehow say it just right, but I was always wondering the source of that.
Huh. And David, what did she mean by that exactly?
She just meant that that was like the straw that broke the camel’s back, I think.
And this was in San Antonio?
Actually, this was in Houston, and she was a woman from Louisiana originally.
Okay.
Tear the rag off the bush. Or sometimes take the rag off the bush, or doesn’t that just take the rag?
Yeah, take the rag off the bush.
This is a well-chronicled phrase that shows up in a variety of different dialect and slang dictionaries going back at least a couple hundred years. It’s an American expression, although there’s a related phrase that pops up in a dialect dictionary in the U.K., which is to take the rag off the edge. But here in this country, it’s very heavily associated with Western ideas of cowboy sort stuff and farm stuff and rural stuff. Definitely not a city term.
And there are a number of different theories about this. The most common theory, the one with the most weight behind it but still uncertain, is that it has to do with shooting competitions where you might put anything in a bush at a distance, a piece of bark or a branch or even a rag or a piece of cloth, and then that’s what people would try to shoot. You might tie the rag to a branch and then try to shoot it off. And so if you take the rag off the bush, you are literally winning the shooting competition. You walk home with the prize, whatever that might be.
To take the rag off is more common these days. Just the off the bush part just doesn’t appear.
And it’s more often take than tear?
Yeah, it’s more often take than tear.
Interesting.
But it’s a couple hundred years. 1810 is the earliest citation in both the Dictionary of American Regional English and the Oxford English Dictionary.
Wow.
Yeah.
Well, thank you, Grant. I knew I could rely on you to be a font of information.
He’s a font, all right.
Well, thank you very much. David, it’s good to talk with you.
Thanks for calling.
Thanks, bud.
Thank you.
It’s my pleasure.
Thank you.
Okay.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Well, have you heard something from your co-worker that has you wondering? Call us, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.
