What an interesting old phrase!  Your compiler has heard it all his life, and for most of it had no clue where it came from.

    It means something like, “that takes the cake,”  “that beats a hog flying sideways,” and similar expressions.  It can also mean, “That’s the absolute last straw,” which is how your compiler  has usually heard it employed.  It is quite colorful and certainly sounds Southern.  Your compiler cannot claim with certainty that it is, but believes it would be if the world were perfect.

    When he was a child and his mother would say, “Boy, I’ll tell you what!  That just takes the rag off the bush!” he knew he was in for a sure-enough whipping, not just a run-of-the-mill love-tap with the yardstick, which he got regularly.  When your compiler heard his mother say he had taken the rag off the bush – which, fortunately, she did not say very often – he knew his shoulders were pinned to the mat and there was no escaping the wrath of the lioness who had brought him into the world and who seemed for the moment poised to take him out of it.

    Before writing today’s column, your compiler looked the phrase up online, expecting to find no insight.  To his surprise, Artificial Intelligence came to the rescue, and two potential origins for the phrase were presented.  One was a primitive shooting contest, in which a small rag was placed on a far-away shrub, and contestants fired away at it till someone could hit it.   

    That seems unlikely to your compiler, since most Southerners have handled guns since they were children and are good enough shots to hit a dadgum rag from about any distance.  So that explanation feels to your compiler about as artificial and lacking in substance as folks complain about AI being in general – just plain old hollow and fake.

    The other suggestion stemmed from the long-ago practice of bathing in a creek, pond, or river, when one fully disrobed in as private and secluded a place as possible before partaking in his or her ablutions.  The set-aside clothes would likely be draped carefully over a nearby shrub or small tree, rather than being tossed carelessly onto the ground where they might get dirty.   

    To remove or hide someone’s clothes in so vulnerable a moment would be a vicious and hateful thing to do by any standard, and would amount to taking the rag off the bush, both literally and figuratively.  While that explanation seems much more plausible than the first, it still seems to your compiler to have a whiff of taint from AI’s general reputation.

     So whatever the phrase’s origin, your compiler is both happy and sad because he has not heard it said in years.   Happy because he’s apparently figured out how to behave well enough not to have the ancient threat invoked upon his head, but sad because the colorful old phrase seems to be fading from memory. 

     And besides, if memory serves, hearing that someone else had taken the rag off the bush could lead to a great deal of excitement, especially if one of your compiler’s pesky little siblings were the offender.  For after all, a kid getting to watch another kid get punished can be great fun!