DIRTNAP
Eternally hip, ever droll, Lee Hazlewood, he who supplied These Boot Are Made for Walkin’ for Nancy Sinatra, has recently turned his attention, in Dirtnap Blues, to the subject of turning up the toes. He says that to take a dirtnap — be buried, dead — is a Texan phrase. It has not yet reached the OED; meanwhile Jonathon Green calls it a Nineties, Black expression but Jonathan Lighter locates a repeated appearance in an early-Eighties American television series Bosom Buddies, which is far from dirt (Old Norse, in which it is drit) and nap (Old High German). To take a dirtnap is the ultimate in cutting dirt — an early 19th-century Negro term for taking one’s leave.
CAH