Bill caught me out in a mistaken use of a UK regionalism in a little story purporting to be Amercian-set: I think I did know, but had forgotten, that graft shares some meanings either side of the pond, but has some meanings that are specific to each side too. What follows are definitions courtesy of the Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary, accesible via OneLook:

1
graft (PIECE)
noun [C]
a piece of healthy skin or bone cut from one part of a person's body and used to repair another damaged part, or a piece cut from one living plant and fixed to another plant so that it grows there:
He has had a skin graft on his badly burned arm.

graft
verb [T]
1 to take and attach a graft:
Skin was removed from her leg and grafted on/onto her face.
2 to join or add something new:
The management tried unsuccessfully to graft new working methods onto the existing ways of doing things.



2
graft (WORK)
noun [U] UK INFORMAL
work:
I've never been afraid of hard graft.

graft
verb UK INFORMAL
to work hard:
It was very sad that after spending all those years grafting (away), he died so soon after he retired.

graft
noun [C] UK INFORMAL
a hard worker



3
graft (INFLUENCE)
noun [U] MAINLY US
the act of obtaining money or advantage through the dishonest use of political power and influence:
The whole government was riddled with graft, bribery, and corruption.





(from Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary)

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/results.asp?dict=B&searchword=graft


I'll leave for others to fill in the etymological history of these derivations.

I've never been afraid of hard graft. Don't think that would ever be heard here, coming from a native US'n anyway.

Partridge suggests that by extension of graft 'hard work' (which he says is an Australian expression) came to mean graft of the political kind (which is an Americanism) by being associated with illegal jobs (moonlighting?) I wonder if grift 'illicit profit (as from a con)' is related? Originally one of the meanings of graft (in the OED) is digging (which is hard work) related to the English word grave and the German word graben 'to dig'.

Hm, this gets more and more interesting – definitely worthy of some more digging! American Hurtage gives this note on the etymology of the form to do with transplanted buds:

Middle English graften, alteration of graffen, probably from Old French grafier, from graffe, stylus, graft (from its shape), from Latin graphium, stylus; see graffito. N., Middle English grafte, alteration of graffe, from Old French.

http://www.bartleby.com/61/51/G0215100.html


To this, etymonline adds: from Gk. grapheion "stylus," from graphein "write."

Of the corruption (noun) form, AH simply says ‘origin unknown’.

No ref.'s to graffen or stylus here, but. Are they related?
http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=words&Number=117997

Latin stylus for stilus from stiglus, 'a stake; stylus (for writing); style (a kind of writing)'; cf. English stick, Greek stigma.

Greek graphein is cognate with English crab, cray(fish), and English carve..

Latin scribere, which I believe is the origin of all the other Germanic words for 'to write': cf. German schreiben.

Graphein and scribere both come from roots that have to do with carving or scraping. Our write comes from a root that means to shred or tear; cf. German reissen.

Cribbed from the American-Heritage Dictionary online and Pokorny. Writing was violent in the good old days.

and many have pointed out --it often easier to steal with a pen then with a gun..

and mav, was this a typo, or a freudian slip??
American Hurtage

I'll leave you to wack that one out, oh luncher of a thousand chips :)

And brenda of the topless townies of Illinois.

Our write comes from a root that means to shred..
This I find hard to believe - where is the semantic connection? And indeed, the OED has: The relationship of the stem wr_t- to Du. and LG. forms without w (MDu. and MLG. rîten, etc.) is doubtful
German "reissen" has two rather distinct meanings, which possibly have separate roots: "to draw" (still to be found in "Reissbrett" = drawing board), and "to tear".

Writing was violent in the good old days
Yes, but the result tended to be more durable than in our high-tech age: if you compare the hieroglyphs with our "hardcopy" that is washed away by a single sneeze.

Carvings on stone are pretty good persistence-wise, clay tablets have the happy ability to turn into bricks when they've gone through an arson incident. It's the paper, wood, and wax media that were so ephemeral. Two fun sites to see original Latin and Greek epigraphy that has survived:

http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/
http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/POxy/

Kluge doesn't have a problem with it. "Die Bed.-Entfaltung im Germ. erklärt sich aus der Art, wie Runen in Holz, Stein usw. geritzt werden." But, I'm willing to say the etymology is problematic.