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Of American-English origin, the colloquial phrase to flap one’s gums means to chatter, i.e., to talk continuously about things regarded as trivial or unimportant.
This phrase was used, for example, by the Irish radio and television presenter Terry Wogan (1938-2016) in Exclusive: 500 not out and still going strong: Wogan on Wogan, published in the Daily Express (London, England) of Friday 29th April 1988 [page 22, column 2]—here, Terry Wogan “assumes the role of third person”:
Terry Wogan chalked up his 500th TV show this week […].
[…]
He’ll talk to anybody. If you have to travel through West London, the only safe way to avoid being on Wogan is to use a helicopter.
But then, as he maintains in his more maudlin moments: “If I stick at this long enough, I’ll have interviewed everybody in the English-speaking world at least twice by the turn of the century.”
Good grief, by the time you read this, unless merciful Providence intervenes or the poor old BBC can find some way to prise him from the building, Wogan will have flapped his gums at 2,000 guests.
These are, in chronological order, the earliest occurrences of the phrase to flap one’s gums that I have found:
1-: From the column The Matchbox: Sparkling Comment By And About People Whom You Know, published in The Morning Herald (Uniontown, Pennsylvania, USA) of Wednesday 21st February 1940 [page 6, column 5]:
DIJA KNOW—Patrolman Orangie (Buck) Shaw of Uniontown’s “city’s finest” . . . has an original way to describe oratory . . . On his “day off” recently, he tuned in a station and listened to a flowery and “fiery” speech . . . He confided to several pals on the force that the fellow he heard over the radio “certainly knew how to flap his gums.”
2-: From the Hawaiian Defender, “for and by the soldiers of the Hawaii District”, published in the Hilo Tribune Herald (Hilo, Hawaii, USA) of Saturday 30th May 1942 [page 3, column 2]—here, however, the phrase is the flapping of one’s gums:
Lions’ Mascot Bares It All
(Lady, the Lions’ mascot who sailed with the men from the mainland, and en route gave birth in the ship’s bathtub, last week told about her early life. Here is Chapter II:)
[…]
Adopted as an army dog I naturally had to fall in line with the boys. […] Then began “MY DAY,” and just as you know a woman always has a lot to say, so also there was nothing wrong with the flapping of my gums. I can keep right up alongside any woman.
3-: From Silent Marty’s Kolumn [sic], published in the Redondo Beach Daily Breeze South Bay Daily Breeze (Torrance, California, USA) of Friday 21st August 1942 [page 2, column 5]:
Bartenders and Barmaids
[…] Hal’s Cafe went down two to Zucca’s Cuties, Shirley Fields, Emery Keller and Agnes Keller. . . . Jerry McComey was “flapping her gums” but not the ball—better luck next time, Jerry.
4-: From The Everytown Weekly Vol. 1 No. 5, by Bill Snider, published in the Salisbury Sunday Post (Salisbury, North Carolina, USA) of Sunday 6th September 1942 [page 12, column 3]:
They’re flapping their gums in New Rochelle, N. Y., about the mayor contributing a historic, 300-year-old cannon to the scrap campaign. With the present alarming metal shortage that can’t be much worse than contributing a son or two. We didn’t hear any parents compalining [sic].
5-: From the conclusion to a letter that Sergeant George T. Rickman, of the U.S. Army Air Forces, wrote from “somewhere in Australia”, published in The Hopewell News (Hopewell, Virginia, USA) of Friday 6th November 1942 [page 1, column 5]:
I’m flapping my gums too much, so I’ll ease my manifold pressure and cut my throttle and sign off.
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