I had the good fortune a couple of weeks ago to give a talk about Not One-Off Britishisms in Washington, D.C., under the auspices of the admirable organization Profs and Pints. The fact that about a hundred people turned out on a hot Monday evening to hear me talk about an obscure language topic did my heart good.
It was a rousing group, who laughed in all the right places and had brilliant questions afterwards. I subsequently got an email from one member of the audience, “Dru,” as follows:
“I’ve heard on the Internet (so of course it’s true /s) that the word ‘raspberry,’ as in using your mouth to make a fart sound, comes from Cockney rhyming slang. The rhyme being ‘raspberry tart.'”
What Dru heard was in fact correct, at least according to the OED, which cites a 1902 slang dictionary as giving the rhyming-slang etymology. Green’s Dictionary of Slang provides an earlier explanation (dated circa 1880) of the term from the Sporting Times:
“The tongue is inserted in the left cheek and forced through the lips, producing a peculiarly squashy noise that is extremely irritating. It is termed, I believe, a raspberry, and […] is regarded rather as an expression of contempt than of admiration”
All this was news to me, not only the rhyming-slang etymology, but the British origin, as I had always thought of giving the raspberry as an American thing. But all subsequent citations in Green’s are British or Australian until this rather opaque headline from the New York Evening World in 1918:
“When the Hohenzollerns Stepped Out to Slip the World the Old Razzberry They Forgot That There Is Many a Skid Between the Chinaware and the Chin.”
Note that spelling, “razzberry.” It calls to mind another familiar-word, “razz.” This is both a noun (give someone the razz) and verb (to razz someone), and Green’s and the OED agree that it derives from “raspberry” and that it is very American. It also quickly expanded in meaning from making the “raspberry tart” sound to teasing or verbally abusing someone. Green’s first citation for the verb is from New York State in 1914: “It is not long before you have all of the fun of a baseball game, with one side razzing the players of the opposing side as well as the umpire.” And the noun from Washington, D.C., in 1919: “A fresh cake-eater […] tried to tell Monahan this and got an awful raz.” (All subsequent citations have the double “z.”) In the 1938 edition of The American Language, H.L. Mencken treats both “razz” and ‘raspberry” as strictly American slang.
The concept was so quickly embraced in the U.S. that it acquired a geographically precise synonym. The indefatigable researcher Bonnie Taylor-Blake has found an early example from Damon Runyon, writing in a New York newspaper in 1921. The reference is to Georgia-born baseball player Ty Cobb: and a game against the New York Yankees, who of course played in the New York City borough of the Bronx: “The Jewel of Georgia got the old familiar Bronx cheer when he came to bat for the first time in the first inning. Tyrus would probably be sadly disappointed were he not so greeted in New York.”
In any case, the rapidity with which “razz” was adopted in America suggests to me at least that it may have come from something other than “raspberry.” One possibility is “razoo,” which the OED has found in a Wisconsin newspaper as early as 1888: “Mayor Lawson’s veto of the police service bill..has a strong resemblance to what the political toughs would call ‘giving a man the razoo’.” That’s suspiciously chronologically close to the “raspberry” coining. .No dictionary I have access to gives a helpful etymology for “razoo,” but I found this in a 1945 New York Times book review: “A certain newspaper man is likely to say, come make-up time: ‘I hate to tell you, but I think we’ve got to razoo that back page. I’ll give you a new layout.’ It’s doubtful he knows where the ‘razoo’ comes from. Almost surely it is from razee, a shipbuilder’s term for drastically cutting down the rig of a ship.”
Clearly, further research is called for.
notoneoffbritishisms.com 
Interesting, as usual. Two things that I don’t understand from this entry…
Probably to differentiate ellipses the original author may have used from the ellipses indicating deleted text?
In the 1990s, when I was still a new arrival in London, I recall hearing a disabled person being referred to (behind their back) as a raspberry. I later found out that it was cockney rhyming slang for cripple (raspberry ripple). Of course, in these modern and more enlightened times, such terms have fallen into disuse. It appears that raspberry had two meanings in CRS.
presumably the coinage of a new CRS entry for “raspberry” is due to the fact that the original is now pretty much Standard English, and even the users of CRS aren’t aware of its etymology
Raspberry is an example of one slang word pointing to two target words. However, sometimes, two slang words may point to one target word:
The popular 1950s singer Ruby Murray was still in adults’ minds in the ’80s and so her name was appended to curry in CRS – “Do you fancy a ruby?” – and has remained so in the minds of that generation as it has aged. However, I have just seen on line that ‘Andy’ means curry now. Few people alive have heard of Ruby Murray but tennis player Andy Murray is a much more current figure so his name is supplanting hers.
Several CRS terms may co-exist and vie for dominance for years.
Raspberry is also CRS for nipple.
Eric Partridge, in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1937), gives a date of c. 1875 for “raspberry-tart” for fart, and “raspberry” alone as “gen. considered to be theatrical” (including as a generic term for a sign or gesture of disapproval, including hissing) from middle 1890s. Unfortunately Partridge does not give specific citations.As of today the online OED dates the Barrère & Leland Dictionary of Slang to 1890, not 1902, as its source for “The tongue is inserted in the left cheek…”, but of course Green gives us a better citation for the Sporting Times original from c. 1880 that B & L are quoting. Even better dating is given at the Word Histories blog:”From A look in at Rymill’s, the account of a visit to Rymill’s, in the Barbican, London, where trade-horses were auctioned, by ‘The Talepitcher’, published in The Sporting Times. Otherwise known as The “Pink ’Un.” (London, England) of Saturday 23rd June 1888″https://wordhistories.net/2022/11/24/give-raspberry/and this is confirmed at the British Newspaper Archive:https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/search/results/1888-06-23/1888-06-23?basicsearch=%2braspberry&freesearch=raspberry&retrievecountrycounts=false&newspapertitle=sporting%20times&sortorder=score
—What I can really contribute is an earlier source for the figurative sense (OED 4.b.) of rejection or disapproval (without referring to a noise). The OED online used to cite P. G. Wodehouse, from The Inimitable Jeeves (1923), but at present gives a 1919 citation from W. A. Lathrop. The trouble with that substitution is in dating the Wodehouse quotation to its book collection rather than its original appearances in magazines, in 1918 in both Britain and America.In “Jeeves and the Chump Cyril” (Saturday Evening Post, June 8, 1918):This chump, Bassington-Bassington, would seem from contemporary accounts to have blown in one morning at seven-forty-five. He was given the respectful raspberry by my man, Jeeves, and told to try again about three hours later, when there would be a sporting chance of my having sprung from my bed with a glad cry to welcome another day, and all that sort of thing.https://www.madameulalie.org/sep/JeevesAndTheChumpCyril-SEP.htmlThe same story appeared in the Strand magazine for August 1918, with only slight differences in punctuation in this excerpt.https://www.madameulalie.org/strand/Jeeves_and_the_Chump_Cyril.htmlNot too surprisingly, Wodehouse’s conversion of the term from a rude noise to a polite dismissal by using the oxymoronic “respectful raspberry” is the earliest figurative sense so far found.
As to razoo, razee: I’m thinking raze (flatten, destroy).
Or razor, literally cut from the newspaper.
I recall the narrator in Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess referring to a lip fart.
In British English, it’s ‘blow a raspberry’. There was a series of Jack the Ripper style sketches in The Two Ronnies in the 1970s called The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town, where the murderer killed his victims by blowing a deadly raspberry. Note it’s the sound rather than the idea of being killed by the noxious fumes of actually ‘blowing off’, as we used to call it. The word ‘fart’ wasn’t added to my vocabulary until many years later.
Written by Spike Milligan.
Indeed. And the raspberry sound was madd by David Jason.