Whither withers?

Dear Word Detective:   Is the word “dewlap” Shakespearean?  I mean, did Shakespeare make it up? — Andy McCollough.

That’s a good question.  And while we’re at it, what’s up with all the obscure terminology associated with farm animals?  “Dewlap”?  “Fetlock”?  “Withers”?  “Pastern”?  Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that all mammals shared the same basic bits — head, ears, hips, legs, feet and so on.  Now, I have in-laws who seem to spend most of their time queuing up for major elective surgery, such as hip or knee replacements.  Listening to these people is an anatomy lesson in itself.  But not once have I heard one of them announce that Doctor Lamborghini thinks they need a “fetlock replacement” or a “pastern repair.”  Someone has some explaining to do.

Speaking of “pasterns,” one of my favorite stories about Dr. Samuel Johnson, author of the first true dictionary of the English language, concerns Johnson’s response to a woman demanding to know how he could have erroneously defined “pastern” in his dictionary as “the knee of a horse” (which it isn’t).  “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance,” Johnson replied.

Onward.  A “dewlap” is, as you probably know, the fold of loose skin which hangs from the throat of cattle and similar animals, and, by extension (in humor or unkindness), from the throats of some people.  Similar formations in some animals, particularly chickens and US Senators, are called “wattles.”

Shakespeare didn’t coin “dewlap,” but he was, apparently, fond of the word.  The Oxford English Dictionary lists two citations for “dewlap,” in early spellings, both from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“When she drinkes, against her lips I bob, And on her wither’d dewlop poure the Ale” and “My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kinde … Crooke-kneed, and dew-lapt, like Thessalian Buls”).

When Shakespeare was writing at the end of the 16th century, however, “dewlap” had already been in use for at least two centuries.  It first appeared, as far as we know, in 1398 applied to oxen.  The “lap” of “dewlap” is from the Old English “laeppa,” meaning “pendulous piece or flap,” but the “dew” part is a bit of a mystery.  You might assume that, as the animal grazes in a morning meadow, that flap of skin collects dew from the grass.  But in the related and equivalent forms of “dewlap” in Scandinavian languages (e.g., the Danish “doglaeb” and the Swedish “droglapp”), the first element does not mean “dew.”  That’s a problem.

Etymologists now believe that the first part of “dewlap” was originally a word that sounded a bit like “dew” but has now become obsolete and unfamiliar, and that over the years people replaced it with the more familiar “dew.”  This process of substituting the familiar for the obscure is known as “folk etymology,” and it’s how, for instance, “catercornered” (“cater” being an old English word for “four”) became “kittycornered” after people forgot what “cater” meant.  “Kittycornered” made no sense at all, of course, but it had the virtue of at least sounding a bit less alien.

OK, when I say “Go,” flap your arms and run toward the edge.

Dear Word Detective:  My wife has been going through a tough project at work and as part of the work, they were attempting a “dry run” to see if things will work in a test environment.  On a car trip, I had to ask, “What was the origin of  ‘dry run’”?  One of our ideas was it was from plumbing:  to make sure the pipes didn’t leak, they put air in and tested the joints.  Could we be close? — Rich Harrington.

Wow.  Some people actually discuss word and phrase origins while they’re on a road trip?  In our car the dialog seems to focus on questions like “Is that noise coming from our car?” or “Do you smell something burning?”  Other big hits include “Did you see what that guy just did?”, often followed by “How could you not have seen what that guy just did?” and the ever-popular “Maybe I should drive.”  By the way, did you know that the driver of a car has the absolute legal power to determine what music is played in the car?  It’s in the US Constitution.

A “dry run,” of course, is a rehearsal or practice session conducted to make certain that a system works or that a procedure can be carried out without serious mistakes.  While practice may not make perfect, it does make it a lot less likely that you’ll be scanning the help wanted ads the day after your snazzy new escalator pitches your boss into the koi pool.

Of course calling it a “dry run,” rather than just a “practice run” or the like immediately raises the question of why “dry,” and whether there might be such a thing as a “wet run.”   The first citation for “dry run” in the “practice” sense listed by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)  is from 1941, although the OED does list earlier uses of “dry run” to mean a dry creek bed or desert arroyo.  But since no one has ever come up with a plausible scenario linking the two senses we can safely assume that the two uses are unrelated.

As a matter of fact, until just a few years ago, no one had come up with a truly convincing explanation for the origin of “dry run,” and the only theories proposed were halfhearted attempts to connect the phrase to such phrases as “dry heaves” (slang for unproductive vomiting).  But in 2004, Douglas Wilson, a poster to the mailing list of the American Dialect Society (ADS), offered (and, more importantly, documented) what I believe is a slam-dunk answer to the “dry run” question.
It turns out that “dry run” comes from the jargon of fire departments (where a “run” is a dispatch of a fire brigade).

Beginning in the late 19th century, fire departments in the US began conducting practice sessions where engines were dispatched and hoses deployed, but water was not pumped, thus making the exercises literally “dry” runs.  Public exhibitions and competitions between departments also typically centered on such “dry runs.”  Conversely, a real run to a “working fire” where water was pumped was known as a “wet run.”  In his posting to the ADS list, Doug Wilson found instances of this use of “dry run” dating back to 1893.  Just when the term came into more general use meaning “practice session” is uncertain, but it seems to have been after “dry run” was widely used in the US Armed Services during World War II.